The False Chronicles: I Want To Return To That Day
by Nabiki GMYW
Summary: Dual forces finally meet and life won't be the same for a certain clan, their enemies and their allies. The end of a dream and a fond farewell. Daylight, and then… Chapter 7 (of 8) – I Want To Return To That Day


**The False Chronicles**

_Chapter Seven – I Want To Return To That Day_

By Nabiki GMYW

Brief summary: Dual forces finally meet and life won't be the same for a certain clan, their enemies and their allies. The end of a dream and a fond farewell. Daylight, and then… Chapter 7 (of 8) – I Want To Return To That Day

Disclaimer: Gargoyles belong to Disney, everybody else belongs to me. The next-to-last part of my mini-series. Email at paganj@caribe.net If you haven't read the last six chapters, then what are you doing here?

Maybe the word he was looking for was 'wasted'.

_If you want to talk to me…_ the queen had said the other night, back in the Cloisters, back when he didn't know what he knew now _…you must use the cards._

That seemed to be ages in the past, although it had occurred just twenty-four measly hours ago. Then again… a lot of things can happen in twenty-four hours. He should know. He was there.

Tonight he was placing the cards that weren't quite cards in the proper position of his own invention. She said he needed the cards but didn't bother to explain how he should use them. He was forced to improvise and soon found himself crafting his very first spell. He quickly understood that to do amazing things he needed to use his weapon in unusual ways; that new magic spells are created when powerful sorcerers can't find the right spell in a book.

Unfortunately, Dennis' type of magic didn't require fancy words or hand movements. It needed concentration, intense concentration, so much so that it tired him and wasted his defenses very quickly. And he felt very, very wasted.

He pressed on. In a way, sitting crossed legged in a bed and placing old tarot cards in odd positions was just a formality, a way to concentrate better. After all, those very cards had been a six foot scythe a few minutes earlier. It was all about perception, and that was a mixed blessing to him. 

Perception was the thing that got him in trouble in the first place. He had a bad week, the worst week of his life, simply because he couldn't see things as they were and just saw them as he wanted them to be.

First, he realized that he was some sort of fate god. Second, he realized that wasn't technically true; he was merely the avatar of a fate god. Third, that most of his memories from his past might not belong to him. And, last but not least, he was faced with a terrible concern: that if he wasn't what he thought he was, then… what _was_ he?

_It would be so simple if I merely blacked out as usual. If I merely stopped remembering what I remember; stop caring about the past that may or may not be mine and launch myself completely into my new career as a god._

Putting it in simpler terms, he just wished he could stop behaving like a human and act like a real god, thunder and lighting and the whole nine yards. But things didn't work like that; he couldn't wish his humanity away. Which was ironic, because he could wish away just about everything else. Literally.

However, he was taking the necessary steps to answer that nagging question. If Titania was his creator (or re-creator) then it was natural to assume she had part of the answer; that she could tell him what he was supposed to do and to be from now on. To do that, however, he needed to bring the Out There over here, buy the fairy queen safe passage to this plane of existence.

Yet once more irony reared its ugly head in his path. If he was going to break some planes of reality, he was going to need power. To do so, he was going to have to relinquish some control to a thing that transcended limitations and other silly things like good and evil. Give a great chunk of control to Seres the god and willingly be pulverized by its presence.

Dennis Anderson had the horrible feeling that his personality could be wiped out in the process and be replaced by Seres, but it was the only way to bring Titania back. The best thing he could do was hang on as hard as he could and try to avoid getting his mind be swept clean.

It's all to get the answers. Or that's what he told himself. He had to admit that the idea of simply shutting down and letting Seres take control was appealing. 

Very, very appealing.

**PART the _FIRST_**

Brooklyn insisted; he said they were going to find Seres.

Against everyone's advice, he had simply snatched the little Game Boy-like device that pinpointed the divinity's location in Manhattan. "Still in his apartment? Good. Let's go, guys, we only have a few hours til' sunrise!"

He asked Owen for walky-talkies for everyone, looking as if he knew what he was doing. The startled majordomo fetched a few pairs for him, not without first asking what he was planning to do.

            "Isn't it obvious? We're going to look for Seres before something really bad happens. Broadway, Lex, Angela, Hudson, you're with me. Elisa, wanna come too?"

            Visibly worried, Broadway's eyes widened and he asked, "Brooklyn, wait, what exactly do you want us to do!?"

            "Brook," Elisa said, with an uncomfortable chuckle, "It's not like we can defeat him…"

            "We're _not_ going to fight. He'll kill us if we fight. We _have_ to get there before Titania does." Brooklyn said, matter-of-factly. "I don't want her to feed him bullshit while we're away."

            "Well, shouldn't we at least have some sort of plan to stop him if he decides to kill us all?" Angela spoke up.

            "It's a god of fate, Angela," Xanatos commented dryly, "I don't think it's killable, but it might be piss-able."

            "Cut the sarcasm, will ya?" Brooklyn muttered to the millionaire.

All of it had become clear, all of it. He couldn't explain it to his friends, he couldn't because he couldn't find the words. Not to them. To everybody else but them.

There was a reason why it was the human part, not the god part, which was in charge of this stupid trial. There was a reason why the weight of the world was endured mere human.

The answer was devilishly clever: _He's human because humans can be turned. They can be convinced, cajoled or threatened into doing something. The door swings both ways; that's what Lester said. _

_Whose idea was this? The gods? Or Titania's?_

_I think it was the gods. And I think Titania was very, very annoyed when she didn't get instant destruction. But maybe you could use that in your favor, am I right? He endures the brunt of your plan, the weight of everything, and you're actually _counting_ on him to buckle. You want_ him to be crushed by those lead weights. You _want__ him to crack under the pressure._

_It is despair, Titania, you clever girl. Despair makes your whole world go 'round, so why not do something productive with it? Give the cross of your world to a mortal's shoulder, make him drink the bitter chalice and choke with it._

He simply couldn't allow it to happen. It wasn't the gargoyle way to let an innocent get manipulated by the fairy queen. Especially since he may share part of the blame. When _all_ of them might have.

The grief got the better of them. They lost the battle against Oberon and never recovered, never _tried to recover. They brooded. They complained. They whined. Yet they never tried to get it over with, hoping that some miraculous solution would fix it all._

Instead, they wrapped themselves in little personal wars or just plain indifference, and it may or may have not given Titania, already upset over the loss of her daughter, some really bad ideas for possible solutions.

She picked the worst possible, truly final solution. It was collapsing this time-track and Ending it all. With a big 'E'.

In other words, the solution would be mass suicide; like crazy cults shacked up in a dingy little house in the middle of nowhere, waiting for a sign to drink the Kool-Aid of Doom.

He thought to their behavior these last couple of months. Had Titania been watching their despair? Did it give her ideas?

            "Come on, guys. Let's go!" he told his fellow gargoyles. "Time to share the blame for once."

            "Brooklyn, this is madness," Owen was saying. "You won't achieve anything by yourself, let us go with you. Mr. Xanatos—"

            "Not going anywhere," Xanatos interrupted, earning a shocked look from Owen. "Don't want to crowd him, do we?" he said, although he gave Brooklyn the distinct impression of being lying. "If we all just march there, we're only going to make him nervous."

            Brooklyn felt somewhat uncomfortable but tried to shake it off. Then it occurred to him to say, "Don't worry. If we're lucky, we might find Titania and bring her here before Oberon shows up. So you can stay on Earth, Owen. Isn't that what he told you? That you'd stay if you got her back?"

It was the first time the young gargoyle saw Owen Burnett flustered. Not a lot, not too obvious, but definitely shocked. Brooklyn grabbed him by the shoulder and whispered softly, "Stay. He needs you. You know that, right?"

Owen stared at him with those blue eyes and slowly nodded. 

            "But Lester said she was dead!" Elisa complained. "How is he going to find her!?"

            "Dennis seems to think she's alive…" Owen muttered in a low-key. "All this time I've been thinking she's gone, but Dennis is stronger than me, and he's apparently convinced she's still around."

            "When a god speaks, I suppose we better listen," Hudson said with a little shrug.

            "I, for one, believe him," Brooklyn said. "I _also believe that having him meet Titania is a terrible idea. Xanatos said so already; she's the one who has been pulling his strings the entire tome. I don't want her to double talk him into doing something stupid, if you know what I mean."_

            "Then I can attempt to contact her," Owen quickly retorted, straightening up, looking a bit more determined than before. "Maybe I can get her before Dennis does."

            Xanatos started to pay some attention. "I thought you couldn't do that!" he said defensively.

            "Actually, I never really tried before…" Owen said, "I really thought she was dead. But if Dennis thinks she's alive, it makes a big difference. It's easier to contact the living than to talk to the dead."

            Elisa stared at all of them and finally smiled. "Gosh-dolly! I think we may have a plan! First one that stumbles upon Titania gives a scream through the walky-talkies. I'll stay here with these two, Brook and the others will go to Anderson's place."

            "Wait a second, lads!" Hudson interrupted, "And suppose we do find Titania, what shall be done with her?"

            "We'll throw her in a sack and wait for Oberon to pick her up, what else?" Xanatos summed up with a wry smile.

Almost immediately, the team split up. Brooklyn and his gargoyles marched out of Xanatos' office, and the leader saw from the corner of his eyes a bright flash of multicolored lights and a very familiar voice of a trickster coming from the room he left behind.

_It's going to work out… _Brooklyn thought to himself, _I just have to have a little faith, that's all…_

*                          *                           *

            "I'm never going to get used to that…" Elisa whispered as a white haired boy simply appeared in the same spot where Owen Burnett had been standing a couple of seconds ago.

            The Puck did a couple of calisthenics and rubbed his hands together in eager anticipation. "_Allrightythen! Let's see where bad girl Titania has been hiding all this time, eh!"_

            "I don't understand…" Elisa said as he slowly approached him, "If Oberon himself couldn't find her, what makes you think you will?"

            "Yea of little faith!" Puck replied, "True, there's an 80% chance my search is going to be useless, but what about that 20%? It helps that she may be alive, as opposed to dead as a doornail. I'm hopeful, detective. And hope is a precious commodity these days."

He plopped down in the floor in a lotus position (either because he needed it or maybe because he was mocking them, she wasn't too sure) and levitated a couple of meters in the air. He seemed to rock in the vacuum, as if he were sitting in a boat. She was never going to get used to that.

            "I don't wish to be rude," he said, "but I'm going to have to ask you to leave. You're brains are like static in the Third Race's radio. No offence."

            "Uh, sure, none taken…" Elisa muttered.

            "Listen…" Xanatos said, facing Puck in midair. He seemed to want to say something, but he wasn't too sure on what. Xanatos seemed almost clumsy in his whole body posture, as if he wasn't sure where to place his hands. He settled with saying, "Don't strain yourself, ok?"

            The Puck gave him a radiant, impish smile and said, "You worry too much, David. Don't despair. You'll only make me nervous." 

As she and Xanatos walked away and closed the door behind them, Elisa's eyes casually wandered over the millionaire and she realized something about herself so obvious it was amazing she didn't acknowledge it earlier._ Was I… jealous of them?_

The shock alone of that realization made her mind drift to the thing that happened to her a few hours ago. Suddenly, she saw her behavior of the last months with a new, unusual perspective.

They exited the office and left Puck to his own devices. And even though her common sense was begging her to drop the subject and set her mind in more productive matters, she couldn't help but just talk about it. Somewhere, deep in the back of her mind, a mini-Elisa with angel wings was making a victory dance.

"Sorry for being such a bitch for the last couple of months, Xanatos. Don't know what came over me. Sorry."

Xanatos crashed into an unfortunate flower vase that happened to be in his way when he heard the words. He spun around and looked at her shocked. "You…" the startled Xanatos began to say, apparently trying to find the right word but failing.

Elisa merely arched an eyebrow. "Jeez, don't look so shocked. I'm a big girl; I know when I've screwed up."

Xanatos had a strange look in his eyes, like one that was trying very hard not to counter with a biting comment. Elisa herself had a hard time trying not to say _'don't overtax your brain'._

Instead, he managed to gather enough wits to say, "All right, what's with the change of mind?"

How was she supposed to answer that? Elisa Maza had no idea why she felt like a burden was off her shoulder. It was gone, yes, the veil over her eyes, but it was not a change of mind as a… new perspective on the matter. And she was beginning to understand.

            "It's just that… apologizing is the least I could do."

            "Trying to clean up your conscience before you meet your maker?" he sassed back.

            She refused to be put off by such a comment. "Things turn suddenly clear when you think your head is about to be lopped off by a demigod."

            Xanatos looked at her a little surprised because that matter-of-fact tone she used. He'd heard the stories from Brooklyn and they sounded pretty…terrifying. So he didn't reply for a change.

            "I don't think you've ever understood why Titania has done all of it." Elisa pressed on, somewhat casually. "You know. Bringing Seres here and all."

            "To kill us all?" Xanatos replied slyly.

            At this, she chuckled lightly. "I think in her mind it's only a mercy killing. Because if you really think about it, all she ever wanted was having Fox back. It's almost admirable."

            Xanatos had long ago stopped smiling. "It's not admirable, it's insane," he said harshly. "The last thing I need is getting wiped out of the face of the earth."

            "Insane, yes, but maybe a bit noble too." Elisa replied, as her tone softened. "She did it for love. Don't underestimate that. If love created the world, is it so unreasonable to think love can destroy it? That by trying to do the right thing, you can screw it up further?"

            "If love is used to massacre billions, then it's not really 'love', is it?"

            "If there's something I've learned this week…" she mumbled, more to herself than Xanatos, "…is that there are always two sides to an issue." Sighing, she added, "Wouldn't it be easier…if everything were black and white?"

            Xanatos merely shrugged. "Don't ask me. I'm not crazy enough to kill someone because I think he's pathetic."

            "No…" she mumbled as he walked away and leaned against the closed office door that held Puck inside, "…you're not…"

For a moment, the conversation crawled to a stop. Xanatos drifted off to another place, a little world inside himself, complete unawares Elisa was looking at him. And she had her own small epiphany.

"You really do love him after all, right?" Elisa said out of the blue, shattering Xanatos' ennui like a baseball against a window.

It was one of those times Xanatos didn't know how to answer that.

But Elisa allowed him a few minutes to compose a descent answer. At last, he said, "It isn't… like _that… Lester is such a prick—" he begun. He paused for a second and then snorted. "You know what the problem with Western civilization is? That they like to lump people in sex and non-sex. Not that I have a problem with sex, it's very fun, mind you… but it's so… _limiting_, don't you think? You've got this whole sexual liberation, revolution or feminism or what have you… but is this any different from the days of corsets and manners? Just… another form of corsets. Not any better, not any worse, but just the same with some minor alterations." He ended up shrugging. "So I guess I can't think of him as just another employee. Well, I never thought of him as _just_ an employee for _obvious_ reasons... but he's been around since even before I met Fox, and I can't help but care about him after all. I suppose I do love him. But how I love him is none of your business."_

"Nope, it isn't it," Elisa assured him, "But I'm glad for you nonetheless. It's nice to see the other side of the coin after Titania used her love to justify the unimaginable. And Anderson knows it. Didn't it occur to you that your love just might make a dent in him?" She paused for a moment and added, "Didn't it occur to you that your love for Puck makes this world just a bit more worth it?"

Xanatos merely stared at her in surprise at Elisa's private little epiphany: that if love was a death god in Titania's arms, then it was a redeeming god in his. The ancient gods were said to have two faces, the terrible one and the merciful one, and their power came precisely from that ability to be both things at the same time. The more she thought about it, the more she remembered occasions when people committed atrocities in the name of love.

_The Beatles were wrong…_ she thought. _You need more than love to live right. What do all sorcerers say? There is no black or white magic. It's all about how you use it._

She felt a little more at peace when she realized that. Whether it was the final answer or not, it made sense to her and maybe that's all she needed. Elisa never stopped understanding Titania. But she did learn to pity her.

**PART the _SECOND_**

It was more difficult than he thought.

It wasn't the complicated 'magic' he had to perform. Bending the laws of physics and make black holes dance tango at your feet was pathetically easy, really. The divine powers were overrated. Fooling around with physics is not a big deal. It was like calculus. A high school student has to survive basic arithmetic, more complicated algebra, and the very difficult pre-calculus to get to calculus. And what is calculus? All of the above reduced to an easy single line of equations. Problems that take three pages in algebra are reduced to a little corner in calculus. It was almost unfair, to go through all that just to have a little shitty equation that, unless you're planning to be a famous mathematician, is rendered utterly useless in real life.

After all, you don't need the square root of a cup of instant noodles when you're shopping in the supermarket, now, do you? All the laws of math are pointless when you don't know how to cook and your life revolves around TV dinners.

Likewise, bringing Titania back from the place she had exiled herself to was easy. He admired her ingenuity and had to admit it was a clever hiding space, to hide in the Out There while everybody else was stuck in the desert of the real. It was a matter of bringing the time of the gods down to the time of the mortals, where he could talk to her better.

It was all the sacrifices he had to make what really hurt him. It had damaged him and he had no idea how much, because he had given Seres the control than not even Lester had given it in the old days.

And it all boiled down to an obsessive little quest to bring Titania back to the land of the living, and he had devoted himself entirely to that cause, like Ahab against Moby-Dick or a spurned lover doing everything humanly possible to make the ex's life thoroughly miserable.

The thing that fueled his determination was the horrible feeling he stopped being Dr. Anderson a long time ago. That this present incarnation may have a few memories from that time, but that technically they never belonged to him. That he had just enough information to function and that the programmer didn't give him any fancy add-ons because she thought he didn't need them. He felt that he was being treated like a laptop with a pirated version of Windows 95, the really crappy version.

For a moment, he thought he hated Titania, although what he really hated was himself. The weak and stupid self that had been fooled and manipulated from day one.

Recklessly, he tried harder with the spell, giving Seres more control beyond the accepted boundaries. He sacrificed his ego in Titania's altar; beheading a lamb and setting it on fire in her tabernacle to see if the fairy queen would do him the kind favor of showing up so that he could strangle her.

He took all his (false) memories, everything he thought to be his thoughts, everything he believed, loved and treasured and gave it all to the god Seres. He saw the deity rip them all to pieces, eat the mutilated parts before his eyes and felt the boon and his blessing descend upon him.

He thought he did it to buy Titania a safe passage to this side of the kingdom, but the real reason was that the past had just turned too painful for his battered mind to control. Much later, he would regret turning his back on his past when he noticed that the ability to recall how his parents looked like, how he first met Mary, how the wedding was supposed to be like, how he spent his college days… was completely and utterly gone.

But that was the future and this was the present, and all he cared about was the huge burden off his shoulders when all the painful memories were gone.

All of it, because he had deluded himself into thinking that he needed Titania to tell him, once and for all, whether he was still the man who was engaged to a certain Mary, or just a faded photograph with a passing resemblance to the real thing…

…and very aware that in doing so there was a chance that he would render the question worthless.

*                           *                               *

Somewhere out there, a very confused David Xanatos was asking an Elisa Maza what she meant to say when his thoughts were redirected to more important, timely matters. They both heard the cry; Puck's outcry apparently. Both she and Xanatos turned around in a moment, but Elisa never quite made it to the office…

Somewhere over the city, a group of gargoyles covered their ears in pain and lost altitude in an alarming rate.

Somewhere in the castle, Puck's whole world stopped making sense.

…And more importantly, somewhere in the city, the queen of Avalon had just appeared, shattering the sky in the process.

Then the world returned back to normal.

Sort of.

Because when Elisa Maza opened her eyes, she realized she was alive, breathing, and so far none worse for wear. At least, until she attempted to stand up, at which point she noticed that there was no ground beneath her body for some strange reason.

*                         *                        *

Brooklyn opened his eyes just in time to realize he was about to crash into pure concrete.

With less than a second to react, pure instinct took over. He spread his wings and narrowly avoided collision by managing to fly just a couple of centimeters off the ground. It did not save him from a safe landing; eventually he did crash and rolled to a stop against a TV antenna.

With the antenna wrapped around him in odd angles, poking him uncomfortably in unmentionable places, he took a couple of seconds to get his bearings and take a very, very deep breath. That… had been interesting. But had the others been so lucky?

Immediately he leapt to his feet. Only…

Brooklyn got the feeling there was something around, something unnatural. He had landed on the rooftop of some sort of apartment building, a small one sandwiched between two taller ones. He didn't see any signs of the others, and for a moment assumed they landed on the other buildings, or in the worse case scenario, the very street.

He ran to the ridge of the roof and peered down, but something was missing. 

The whole street, for starters.

Instead of seeing thousands of cars run along like nervous little ants, he saw a void, dark and empty like the universe itself. In fact, he could've sworn he just saw a comet pass by, right by that big yellow star over there, where lots of blinking white lights could be discernible in the background.

This, Brooklyn concluded, was not good.

*                                *                                    *

Xanatos opened his eyes after what he thought was an attack by dozens of flying bricks.

His body ache was only second to that time when he had foolishly tried to help his father by carrying boxes of fish all day; the traumatic experience killed any love the young David had for the fishing profession.

He tried to gather his wits. Oh, he was getting too old to do this shit, getting hit with heavy objects and all. It dawned on him that he was old enough to get some actual damage from a blow to the head.

When he noticed that the room was wobbling, it worried him that he could actually have real damage. But it was going to take more than that to kill him; it would merely slow him down considerably. Or so he tried to joke with himself when he realized he really couldn't see a thing and that the room was still bobbing up and down, like shaken jelly.

He tried not to think about it. He saw Puck lying face down on the carpet (so this was the office, then?) and was determined to reach him.

His body seemed unusually heavy. Almost as if he were drenched or as if he was truly carrying a heavy box strapped to his back. The floor was…moving. He got the insane idea that he was floating in a sea and holding on to some sort of plank.

And that was exactly what he was doing.

With horror, he saw that the office was indeed flooded and that he was indeed holding on to something— a floating chair.

No. No, wait.

The office _wasn't_ full of water. The office _was_ water; the carpet liquefied and he was swimming on it, only it wasn't quick water, more like quicksand and he saw Puck— oh, no— slowing and surely sinking to his doom.

"No, wait! Puck!"

Xanatos held onto his chair and waded the best he could in his direction. It was difficult because the liquid was so sticky and uncomfortable. Like swimming in not-quite-dry cement.

"_Puck!" Xanatos grabbed him by the waist the best way he could, but watched helplessly as the quicksand pulled him downwards with Puck. "Puck, wake up! Snap out of it! ****__Snap out of it right now!"_

*                             *                                  *

Elsewhere, Puck was feeling a very strong urge to faint.

The room was spinning too much for him to recognize where he was. His senses perceived that he was lying on his back on what surely must've been the floor. He soon grasped that it was a cold, damp, dirty floor.

He opened his eyes and braced himself for the light, except there was no light. It took him even a longer time that he was locked in a room with no windows, but he still couldn't recognize what it really was.

"Whoa, Nelly… the hell was that…" he mumbled to himself as he twisted his aching neck.

Oh, yes… he was trying to perform a spell…a spell… to look for someone. Titania. Yes. Because Titania was hiding and he needed to find her or else he would be forced to return to— 

To Avalon…

And recognized the dungeon to be one of Avalon's lot, and what he didn't know, couldn't possibly know, was that forces bigger than him started to work their little number, from the subconscious up. And his subconscious had become a dark and terrible place lately.

He thought this was Avalon and this was his jail cell and for a brief second he thought that he would go mad. What he didn't know, couldn't possibly know, was that where madness was concerned, he had already set a foot on that dark realm some time ago.

So he stood up and touched the walls, expecting them to do… something, anything to help him determined whether this was real or not.

Whatever it was, it was giving him a headache and it made him feel sick to his stomach. He hadn't even known getting nauseous was physically possible with this body. But he was still capable of being nervous and maybe nervousness had a bigger part of play in his sudden weakness.

Yet the main cause of his woes was all around him, and it took the form of a hum. It was a subliminal tune about nostalgia and old things that would never come again and it was irresistibly delicious like a succulent candy apple. He tried to put up a fight, he really tried but not even the Puck can defend a port all by himself.

The tune was simply… enchanting.

**PART the _THIRD_**

When reality shattered to a billion pieces, Lester Kramer was the only one who survived the initial shockwave that rocked the subconscious of the waking world. Ironically enough, the material world still looked intact to him.

For the security guard, it was another matter.

All that Bruno the squad commander could see was a man of light, which had just replaced a very fleshy one inside the cell. _"Fuck me!" the creature said,__ "The fool is going to kill us all!"_

Next he saw the man pass through the jail cell like a ghost and simply run out of the room as if he had something very important to do.

What Bruno didn't know—couldn't possibly know— was that the forces of chaos were turning his mind into mush and reality inside out. That the man of light was none other than Lester Kramer as the gods perceived him. That his powers had just been restored to him, for a little while, because he had just hooked himself to the eternal power source that is the Dreamtime, Shangri-La, the Twilight Zone.

Poor Bruno knew nothing of this. Poor Bruno was probably going to die.

Meanwhile, Lester took the opportunity to play the hero for once. _If you want something done, you have to do it yourself,_ he concluded. That meant tracking down Seres and taking him out of his misery before he dragged down the world with him.

He reached the nearest window in the hallway and stared downwards. He saw the city twice, with different perspectives. First he saw it as usual, a material city with pull and weight that looked unusually nervous and loud that night. Then he saw it through the eyes of a dreamer, a city of shadows illuminated by a single point of light in the middle of the city, radiating so much power that it threatened to tear reality in two.

It was there, in the center of the magical storm, where Seres was creating the chaos. No choice, then, but to go and get him. Hopefully, he'd survive to tell the tale.

Lester, however, was not holding his breath.

He'd heard this tune before, oh yes. Back when he had also been Seres and he had just realized what was wrong with him. He had also wanted to wreck the world, hadn't he?

_My boy, I know you better than you know yourself. Two of a kind. Too bad I need to kill you. What a pity. We could've been friends._

And he couldn't help but feel a little pang in his chest when he saw reality crumble around him. Despite the circumstantial evidence against it, Lester was still human in his core, something he tried to keep to himself, from himself, and only for himself. The humans wouldn't believe it and Lester would even try to deny it. But the little human part of what used to be him in the long ago and far away did feel something that could be confused with nostalgia.

Lester knew better. He knew that it was just Seres' manipulative song. Or so he told himself. It had gotten to a point he wasn't sure whether what he was feeling was real, or just magical manipulation. He chose to treat it like a shabby trick, but…

_The alternative is no alternative at this point. Not after everything I've done. I'll be damned if I wimp out when I'm just reaching the other side._

But that didn't stop him from wishing everything had turned out… different. Because he did remember when the avatar was just as human as himself. It was just too late to turn back now.

With that last thought, he left the soon-to-be-dead Bruno to his own devices and hooked himself to the chaos, ready to let the bigger forces take him where he needed to be. And he knew where he needed to be and what needed to be done. He just didn't like it.

*                        *                           *

Elisa wished with all her heart that gravity wouldn't kick back in.

In theory, she was lying in the middle of the hallway that led to Xanatos' office. In reality —if that was the term— she was lying on the air, staring down at the swimming pool several floors below her, right through where the stone floor used to be. It seemed as if somebody had just deleted the floor with the click of a mouse.

Yet she was still floating. Well, not quite floating, because she was still on a firm surface even though she couldn't see it. It led her to conclude that the floor had just turned invisible. She didn't know how or why, but it was. Sort of.

Very carefully, she got to her feet and stood up. It wasn't as if it was the first time she faced an invisible floor. It happened back in Avalon, in King Arthur's Chamber. The leap of faith, they called it.

She soon found out that the leap of faith this wasn't. She cautiously poked with her foot a bit further ahead of her and realized there was no floor whatsoever. Then she threw a pen and watched it fall into the abyss. She never heard it clank on the bottom; then again, she wasn't expecting it to. A bit of analysis revealed that she was standing on a little invisible island in the groundless hallway, that if she moved just a few inches she would fall to her doom.

She did, however, looked around her and often her eyes played tricks on her, as if the wall in front of her seemed to be… unraveling for her. Like one of those magic pictures she had to see cross-eyed.

And then there was the music. She wasn't hearing it… it was just— like a catchy song in the radio that kept playing on her head, no matter how much she resisted.

What she didn't know, what she couldn't possibly know, was that the song was the same song that was driving the city completely bonkers. So as she stood there in the air, wondering what was going, forces beyond her control had just started to whisper interesting things to her in the depths of her mind. It didn't affect her yet, but in a few hours—

But the present Elisa knew nothing about that. She just heard the tune talking about trees and nature and she racked her brain trying to remember where she heard it first. But it did give her an idea.

_I dreamed about something like that, didn't I? But it was autumn, and it was the park…_

And she realized she wanted to be there, that she needed to be there, that it was in her best interest that she be there. It had something to do with Seres, and even she didn't know what help she'd be, she had to try to reach the park. She was a weak and helpless human, but sometimes— sometimes just _being_ there makes all the difference.

But she didn't know how to get out the castle or make it to the park to begin with.

Eventually, she had to sit down. Stranded, she took the time to try to figure out what happened to the others, what happened to everybody in the city. Had Seres acted? The yelling, was it Puck's? She pondered those things, as she had nothing to do, until she saw someone walking straight at her, with the confidence of someone that knew she was screwed and he was not.

            "Lester! Lester, you prick, what the hell is going on!?"

            Indeed, Lester Kramer walked on over and stood a safe distance away from her, where she couldn't reach him. He seemed to be walking on thin air and not minding it one bit. In fact, he gave Elisa a crooked smile and shook his finger at her. "Now, now, Detective Maza! Is that anyway to talk to your savior?"

            "Then get me out of here, _o savior of mine_!" Elisa hissed between teeth. "How come you're here, anyway!?"

            " 'Here'?" Lester said as he began to stroll in the air, "Define 'here', detective. Seres has shaken the foundations of our world. As consequences, bits of the shadow realm are propping up in the waking world. And just so happens that in the shadow-land, I'm far more powerful."

            "Shadow-land…?"

            "The other side of reality, my dear detective…" Lester said as he casually paced about the thin air with long, exaggerated steps that made him look both playful and thoughtful. "The… underbelly, if you will. The collective Id of the world. Dreamtime."

            Dreamtime? Elisa knew Dreamtime. Goliath talked sense to the Matrix creature in that place, back in Australia. "I think I know what you're talking about…" she said, "The shaman said that what you do there affects the real world."

            "Ah! So she _can_ be taught!" Lester said proudly. "But wait! It gets _better_! Half the city is already under the influence of Seres' power! Give it enough time and it can take over the world! _Bwhahaha!"_

            Only Lester could be so flippant about the End of the World. "Is this it? The end of the line? First Manhattan turns inside out, then everybody else?!"

            "The short answer is… _yes_." Lester replied, sighing heavily. "The long answer is _maybe… Don't worry. You'll know I've failed when reality comes crashing down."___

            "What!? Just shut up and save me, you arrogant prick!"

            "No time for small fries, detective…" Lester retorted. "I can't save the city by rescuing people one by one. You're going to have to stay put for awhile, I'm afraid. I'm going to face Seres… don't wait up."

"Wait! Don't go!" Elisa was shrieking as he walked away from her and vanished from her sight. Oh, great. Lester was trying to play hero, but that was the equivalent of Demona trying to 'save' gargoyle-kind. And she suddenly burst out, saying, "I had a dream, Lester! About a park, a girl and two guys!"

And, much to her surprise, Lester came to a dead stop and slowly, very slowly, came about.

And to her bigger surprise, she noticed that he was completely taken back. For once, all his arrogance remained in check and he looked… human.

            "Did you, now?" he whispered back. "I remember that day. But it was a lifetime ago, detective. And sometimes you need to let go of the past to survive."

            "I need to be there," she replied.

            But he merely chuckled. "If it's your fate to be there, then you will be there," he said, sounding like again like an arrogant prick. "No need for me to speed up fate, eh?" 

He said nothing else; merely spun around and walked out of her sight, off to play the hero in this macabre world. Elisa was once more alone, stranded in an invisible hallway, without room to move.

_This can't be happening,_ she thought as she mulled over everything that happened, everything they had gone through. _Why did you show me the future if you're going to take it away, Seres? Why show me how it could be like if you never intended to let it happen?_

_Why? Why jerk our chains?_

_What is this whole masquerade for if you're not giving us a fair chance?_

_Why, Seres? Why?_

*                               *                                 *

On the other side of the city, Brooklyn was in a predicament similar to Elisa's. Instead of a tiny piece of invisible real estate, he was stranded in a spacious rooftop of some building, floating aimlessly in the depths of space.

It reminded him of an old myth he once read… that the world is not round, but flat, and flying through space in the back of a turtle…

The city had vanished and the cosmos replaced it. The universe was all around him, upwards, downwards and sideways. It was very pretty, but he was in kind of a hurry.

"How do I get out of here, anyway…?" he whispered to himself. Even the door leading downstairs was contaminated by the cosmos.

_It can't be real,_ he reasoned. _It can't be. It has to be some sort of illusion… Seres must be doing something to make the world go crazier than usual. So, in theory, I could jump off the roof and end up where I originally started._

It wasn't as if he had much choice. Either he jumped, or he stayed there, stuck forever, while the world went to hell. It wasn't as if the cosmos around him was real… there was no air in space, any moron could tell you that, so if he really were in outer space, his lungs would've exploded or something.

The logic made sense, but it wasn't particularly comforting. But he had to do something, no matter how inane. If he didn't die now, he could very much die later, so might as well go out giving it all.

"We've all fought so hard… so hard…" he muttered quietly.

And they had the gods' blessing, or so he liked to think. But he was almost sure that those so-called gods did have an inclination to help them. He wasn't sure if that was true; or if he was merely fooling himself if he thought somebody gave a damn, but… 

But it was comforting to think so. If he was going to get himself through this, he had to have a little hope, because just having a bit of it could make the whole difference. That's what made a man make a stand and change the world, or just sit it out and get squashed by it.

He stood at the edge of the roof and took a deep breath. A comet swished in the bottomless distance, like a car speeding in a highway. If there was a time to test hope, this was it.

He _could_ just plummet to his doom, have his lungs explode, and die a grisly death. But not only did it not make any sense; he honestly didn't think so. Not when he made it so far and seen the things he'd seen. It would be a shame, a crying shame for any god to let such a project (he was almost sure this was their very special project) go to waste.

"It's not real…" he muttered; "It _can't be real." He closed his eyes and started chanting, "I'm back in Xanatos' office, I never left…back in the office…never left…back in the office…never left…"_

He took a deep breath and leapt off the edge with his wings extended. But soon he realized this wasn't working out as planned. Much to his horror, Brooklyn started to fall like a lead weight, and for a crazy second he really thought he'd leapt into a vacuum, because there was no air resistance to carry him, yet he was still breathing, but that didn't make any sense, and he just kept tumbling downwards the long dark night, just falling—

Falling and falling, until he landed on what was unmistakably the ground—

*                                *                                *

—of a dungeon.

The room spun for a long couple of minutes. Brooklyn's eyes had to readjust to his new surroundings, though for a few seconds he thought the room was… unraveling all around him. Like… like somebody trying to undo a carpet string by string. Hard to describe, and it just lasted a second, but Brooklyn wished he had more time to figure it out.

But then the room got discernible and he stumbled upon another little surprise. The first thing he saw after his eyes relearned the art of focusing was Puck's smiling face, saying, "Brooklyn! I never thought I'd be so happy to see one of you gargoyles in my **_life_**!" 

Brooklyn, however, was still to dazed to know what just happened. He tried to ask, but all that came out was some sort of babbling with a remote resemblance to real words. Even his tongue, it seemed, had gone all twisted.

            "Quite a bump there, eh? Just hurry up and rescue me so we can get out of here!" Puck squealed loudly as he ran to help him up.

            "Whoa… wait… slow down…" Brooklyn said as he rearranged his thoughts. He got to his two feet and looked around. "…the hell is this place…!?"

            Puck sighed and also stared around. "I thought it was Avalon, but now I'm not so sure…"

            "Yeah!" Brooklyn concurred, shaking his head as everything came into focus. "The guys and I were gliding to Anderson's place when… I don't know! _Something_ happened!"

Puck, apparently, was just as confused as Brooklyn; and perhaps even more nervous, something the gargoyle considered odd because, well, this was a Child of Oberon; he was supposed to know this shit inside out.

But Brooklyn did see him roughed up around the edges, although he seemed to be trying very hard not to let it show. "I was… opening my mind to see if I could find Titania…but…" He rubbed his temples and tried to organize his thoughts. "Dennis did something… he was looking for Titania too… and I think he brought her back from her hiding place…"

Brooklyn's eyes widened and he watched Puck walk around the room, touching the walls as if to make sure they were real. He was clear headed enough to figure out what this place was. 

            "Your dungeon in Avalon, am I right? According to Xanatos, you had a rough time—"

            "Dennis has just snapped a few realities in half, Brooklyn," Puck snapped harshly, "We have to get out of here before the shit _really hits the fan."_

            The gargoyle frowned softly and nodded. "Right…" he muttered, clearly getting the point. He decided to switch subjects. "Well, what can you tell me about our situation?"

            "Not much," Puck went on, considerably less jovial than before. "Let me put it this way: we were both looking for Titania in the same waveband. But Dennis' better radio somehow screwed up mine. Got that?"

            "Uh, yeah…" the gargoyle said, hoping that didn't meant what he thought it meant, "But you _can_ get us out of here, right?"

            Puck rolled his eyes at him and sighed exasperated. "That _also means I'm completely powerless for the moment, Brookie…"_

            "Wonderful…" Brooklyn sighed, as his hopes of an easy solution were dashed. Things were never easy, weren't they?

            Puck suddenly snapped around to face him. "Hey, how did _you get here?"_

            "Fell off a roof," Brooklyn sighed, earning a confused look from Puck.

            "Well, whatever you did, it was extraordinarily stupid." Puck went on as if he had never spoken. "I think I know what this place is… Angela and Elisa may have mentioned it once… the Dreamtime?"

            "_Dreamtime_? What the hell is that?"

            "Like the shadow of the real world. Kinda like the other side of the mirror, so to speak. Whatever Dennis is doing, it's affecting the Dreamtime and hence the waking world. That's how it works. You change something in here, and it's reflected in reality."

            "That's all well and good, but… how do we get out of here?"

            "We don't. Not yet, anyway. It's not like we wanna get lost in this realm… they say that it ain't pretty…if you're not careful, they say your nightmares can…come alive…" Puck sighed deeply as he leaned against the wall and slithered down to the floor. "We have to wait. All we can do now is wait and see."

            "We can't just sit and wait it out!" Brooklyn exclaimed. "I don't want Dennis reaching Titania before we do!"

            "Then you're out of luck, gargoyle…" Puck muttered with tinges of bitterness. "From what I could feel, he's already found her."

**PART the _FOURTH_**

Dennis Anderson sat on his bed and drunkenly stared around his room while the sky fell apart outside his window.

To the untrained eye, his bedroom was a fairly unremarkable place. To a bigger, better eye, it was the epicenter of a magical storm that threatened to split reality like a twig.

The humans on the street knew there was something horrible going on, but they weren't able to explain it. What they didn't know—what they couldn't _possibly know— was that these things were happening in a plane that wasn't readily accessible by their minds. The Australian shamans called it Dreamtime. Some romantic mathematicians call it the Sea of Dirac. In Star Trek speak, it would be subspace. And when somebody tinkers around subspace, strange things happen in the real world._

People were starting to see things that weren't suppose to be there and weren't _actually there, although for all practical purposes there they were. People that were never born, people that never got married, people that never died._

Buildings that never existed, buildings that existed but don't exist anymore, buildings that never ceased to exist. Cars that would never happen (running on electricity!), cars that will happen but not yet and cars that barely look like cars.

It was madness. It was madness, but it invisible madness, because it was happening in the subconscious of fair New York City, and it was rapidly expanding to nearby cities and states.

Nobody could stop it and few people were even aware of it because it was happening in the underbelly of the so-called real world. Uber-reality. Shangri-La.

Except…

It's not that Lester Kramer could actually stop the increasing madness that was taking over the human minds. It was just that he was immune to it by the virtue of his nature.

As he walked down the streets, he saw the world as it was as opposed to the hysterical woman, her mind already immersed in the chaotic magical storm brewing in her unconscious, who was seeing things that could once be but never were instead.

All around him he saw the city break down and plunge into both administrative and unreal disaster. With mad mobs running down the street, chasing (or being chased) by the figments of their imaginations, the city was crumbling down into a war zone. The looting was beginning, along with the random violence of desperate people taking out their frustration on fellow human beings with really heavy baseball bats.

Meanwhile, what was left of the Police and the National Guard were trying to control the situation. They saw their comrades and partners sink into chaos and Lester knew it was just a matter of time before they, too, fell pray to the collective delusion.

Even though they tried to trace the origins of the collective breakdown to poisoned waters or some kind of weapon, and armed troops roamed down the streets looking for something, anything, they looked but they did not see.

Because the true origin of the meltdown was in an ordinary apartment building, a nice place, very chic. To the untrained eye, it was just a building. To Lester Kramer's eye, it was the point in space where several realities were collapsing at once and the shock waves were slowly but surely driving everybody crazy.

The world was unraveling. It had begun in the Dreamtime and had now spread to the waking world. And the one that started the unraveling wasn't in a hurry to stop it.

Lester Kramer took it upon himself to tell the lad to hurry up and stop killing the world.

"Heaven help us all…" he muttered.

*                          *                              *

Like the rest of humanity, Dennis was having a hard time trying to think straight.

Although he was the cause of the disturbance in reality all around him, he had so far managed to resist the call of chaos he had started. He had been _determined; he had been __convinced that it was the only way to bring Titania back._

Once he achieved that, his mind started to crumble under the pressure of Seres, who was chaos and destruction personified.

But he didn't know that just yet.

He did, however, start a mental tally of what the spell had cost him. He felt tired and worn out and wished he could just take a little nap.

(A little nap, the cynic would whisper back, and just let somebody else take up the cause. Seres really doesn't need you. It's a god, it can manage by itself. I'm sure he'll do a bang-up job.)

But he resisted the urge to fall asleep. He needed some answers and he wasn't about to let go when he was so close.

(So the little voice changed tactics and said, But that's so ridiculous, because by using Seres, you've basically rewritten your whole brain. What I'm trying to say, my boy, is that you don't have to do anything. You don't have to be the old human doctor if you don't want to, you don't have to be the god if you don't want to; you can just let go and let someone else take up the cause. Wouldn't that be fun? You can be a whole new person if you would do me this tiny little favor…)

For the moment, though, he thought he had made it. She was sitting next to him in the bed, and she looked at him like his mother used to. (His mother? What mother? Wasn't it clear by now that he was _a_ Dennis Anderson, but not _the_ Dennis Anderson that used to be engaged to a pretty girl named Mary… Mary-something?)

            He blinked. "I don't remember her last name."

            "I know," she said softly with (deceivingly) warm eyes.

She was glorious. She really was. She looked rather different from the Titania he'd seen before, the Titania _everybody had seen. She was sitting there, with her arms delicately folded and looking forlorn, looking lovely with a mythical air of saintliness that didn't quite ring true. _

Because no matter how lovely she looked, his room was unusually dark. He could perceive that the power was out and that there was a storm outside his window. It felt like one of those miserable rainy days when everything is a constant shade of gray and no matter how many lights are on, they do nothing against the oppressive darkness. Titania shone with her own light, yes, but even her aura was muted. The air around them was heavy with the smell of funeral bouquets; it was oppressive and hard to breathe in.

Her mere presence seemed to make the room intimate, so much sadder. Blue-tinted nostalgia of visiting the place you were born and the life you can't get back, that you _shouldn't get back. An age that's nice to look at, but nobody would want to live in._

            "You called me here, didn't you?" he said. He sounded naïve and he knew it, so that had to mean he wasn't as naïve as he thought he was. "Why?"

            "Because I have chosen you. I've chosen you to realize my vision. Change the world. Make it whole again."

            "Bring your daughter back."

            Titania, Queen of the Third Race, Grace Personified, nodded.

            "Titania, _who am I?_"

She looked at him. He could perceive that saying her name like that, with no fear or honorific, was improper. But he honestly didn't care.

            The answer was unhelpful. "You're the judge," she said as if that might explain everything.

            "That's it? Just a judge?" he said, measuring his words carefully. "Who am I really? Am I really that doctor that died, is there anything left of him in me other than his face?" …And it occurred to him, with some dread, that he might have answered his own question.

            Titania chose the easy way out by responding with an obnoxious vague fairy answer. "Nobody really, truly knows himself. Maybe you are what you are. Who you _think_ you are."

            He blinked and understood perfectly well what that meant: nothing. More than that… she didn't know. Or maybe there was nothing _to know. "…just a judge…" he whispered._

            "Not just a judge," she added, as her eyes lightened up, "A miracle maker…"

She granted him a vision of her, the daughter. He could understand perfectly well what made Janine 'Fox' Renard Xanatos so engaging. Her charisma could move mountains. She could make a crowd fall silent. She could make a room start spinning. She had the force of a small sun, and she could make people dance around her like planets.

Like mother, like daughter. He wished he had a chance to meet her, such a wondrous woman, because he wondered how much of the mother could survive in a mostly-mortal offspring. But somebody had said otherwise.

            "So you do understand." The fairy queen whispered, her heart soaring, "and you also understand the injustice, do you?"

            Yes, he understood all right. "Why do you blame us?"

Us? Where did that came from? It just made him feel more unreal, and he didn't like that. But it perfectly accurate, that weird 'us'. It was around, the other one, but his music turned down. It was playing close, very close attention— to the pictures in his mind, the revelation that came from himself (whoever he was) and not the deity.

            His eyes narrowed as he conjured up the memory of Xanatos explaining it all to him. "But didn't you bring the fairy king yourself?" he said, with a hint rebellion lurking from what used to be him in the long ago and the far away. 

            She stopped smiling. The façade began to crack.

            "That's _not_ the point," she said, still lovely, but straining, "You know this wasn't meant to happen. If this world has a future, then what is Seres doing here? You know what I'm talking about. _You_ are Seres."

That much was right. Seres was the one who cut the strings. If he appeared, it was because there were strings meant to be cut. His mere presence indicated that something was about to end, something important—

_(_—_and a little voice interrupted, saying, that's not the whole story and you know it because you indeed are_ Seres and you know how things work with Seres, you should know better, you should—)__

"You know this wasn't meant to happen. Like you know you aren't supposed to be here. You cheated."

_(—oh, cheated did we? Did we cheat? Did we ask to be here? Did we order the king there? Did we truly set this in motion?—)_

"The dead aren't supposed to come back to life. You don't belong here. None of us do. Return us to that day, set things right," she pleaded. She was so dazzling, her light was clouding his mind—

"The answer to the puzzle."

The poem in twenty languages he didn't understand. He did now. She unscrambled the jigsaw and gave the words to him. It was no poem. It was a prayer:

_Gods forgive your tender child._

_I of wind and forests and waters Wild,_

_Do beg and plea._

_Please uproot Destiny._

_Set times river straight,_

_Make what is not be._

_I now See._

_Let us being again to wipe away fear grief and hate.___

_A second chance to stretch time out into Eternity._

Wrapped in those words was a map to the wonderful place she wanted to build using him. Behind the words there lay her true intentions, in the ink that she used, in the curves of the A, in the dot of the I, on the very quality of the paper he held in his hands. It was plain to see to anyone who understood the hidden meaning of all words.

Look hard enough and see the floor plan for a future suited to fit her whims, every archway, every string, every possibility was accounted for, written in a script where he was expected to act and later die tragically for her sake. Here, then, was the story of Titania as she would love it to be; flattering herself and expanding her role just a little too much for his taste.

"Please, Seres, if there is any sense of mercy in you, _please_…" she said, almost begged, "Grant this servant this wish, this _one wish… undo these mistakes. She wasn't supposed to die, not her, not the gargoyle. I didn't mean any harm, I didn't mean—" she tried to choke a sob, "I want to make it _right_, Seres. I put everything in place for you, I stacked the cards, I placed the dominos, I wrote the words… you just have to __say them. That's the only thing you have to do. _Say_ it. I will dedicate my __life, the rest of my days in your service, I will become your priestess, I will be your servant ever lasting… _please_…"_

She knew she was sincere about one thing: her love for her daughter was all-consuming and ever-lasting, incinerating everything it touched. He understood her love, but still there was something not right about the proposed solution.

So far, he wasn't convinced. _She wrote the story that we'll be expected to act, he considered as he studied the secrets hidden in that seemingly simple piece of paper.__ How did that go? "The world's a stage and we are but shadows…" Or maybe that's not it at all. Was the cop right? Can love be used to recreate the world in your image?_

But it's not any love, it's Love that has to wreck and destroy and change the nature of the very thing you fell in love with. Is that _fair_?

            "But if I do the spell, it means death. To you, to the humans, to the clan…" something darkened in his face, "…to me."

            "You're Seres," she told him, very sweetly. "You get to live forever."

            He looked at her, as if for the first time ever.

            She didn't look so pretty anymore.

            Still, she handled him the insignificant paper with the spell that'll End It All With Capital Letters.

And he actually began to consider it, mostly because he felt so…wrong. Empty like a flower vase. He tried to think about the life that he was _supposed_ to have and came up empty. He couldn't recall anything. He realized with perfect clarity that he had been created to be an empty vessel for a deity with so many names it ended up with none.

Maybe he wasn't worthy enough to be here. After all, he was just a shadow. If the worst happened, nobody would _really miss him. Maybe it was for the best… maybe it was the thing to do…_

**_"Or maybe you need to get over yourself!"_** a third voice yelled from the doorway. It was a man. In a trench coat. With… a hose. **"_BANZAI_!"******

Lester Kramer, the uninvited guest that showed up in their intimate soiree without an RSVP, did the unbelievable: 

He started the hose.****

*                           *                           *

"YOU—!" Titania yelled as she leapt to her feet— and she was thrown backwards by a powerful current of water coming from an industrial hose conveniently located in the end of the hall, provided by the fine men and women of the Fire Department, for use in case of emergencies such as fires and mad fairies inside apartment buildings.

Lester Kramer, two-thirds god, seer of dirty secrets, former master of the Seres, poker fan and now part-man gardener, gave Titania the Witch Queen a _niiiiiiice_, long, cold, **bath**.__

He stood a fair distance from the queen with his hose at the maximum setting; his legs spread apart like a macho fireman and the ugly smirk of someone who loved every moment of this interruption. He wore dark glasses, appeared to be chewing gum, and was dead set on leaving Titania more drenched than it was humanly possible.

"Let's get you _right there behind the ears!" Lester yelled with the magnificent smirk of those who are too audacious for their own good. The queen desperately tried to say something, only to be overpowered, nearly __drowned, by a torrent of water coming from the hose._

Dennis Anderson, former doctor, part-time demi-god, Trekker, dog-owner and soon-to-be amateur marathon runner, could only sit there and stare.

Amid the whirlpool of thoughts that fried his brain the instant he saw the beautiful, all mighty, all-knowing Queen of Avalon yell in the floor of his bedroom like a cat being forced into an early bath, spluttering— _spluttering_!— something about _How dare you, I'll kill you, I'm gonna shove that hose up your **ASS**,_ one single silent thought rose above it, even above concerns over his bedroom, even above concerns about the carpet, even above concerns about what she might do when she finally got away from that water attack…

"Kennedy needs a bath…"

Lester was unrelenting; he gripped that pistol as if his life depended on it (it did) and yelled, "HA-HA, bitch, and **_choke_ on it!"**

The fairy queen eventually took shelter by ducking next to the bed. It was an amazing leap, as if this was a war movie and the hose was a semi-automatic gun.

Once she was out of sight, Lester didn't waste time: he tossed the hose aside, turned to Dennis, yelled "RUN!" and ran away himself. Dennis didn't have time to react. By then time he blinked, the weird guy was already out of the room. A good ear would hear him running down the hall and reaching the stairs.

Left behind, Dennis was still getting trying to process the last thirty seconds. While his brain was trying to catch up with real time, he noticed Titania started to glow red for some reason. The strange glow convened to him without words and in graphic mental pictures what Titania was planning to do with Lester and the hose. Never had she been so open, her thoughts so unprotected from other minds, her ideas so utterly and completely nonsensical.

His course of action was suddenly ridiculously simple. Rather than stay here and serve as Lester's substitute, he discarded any heroic or chauvinist ideas and ran away as if she were the dinosaur and he the afternoon snack.

He grabbed the cards that lay neatly on his bed and changed them back into the scythe, then hauled ass out the apartment, running, almost flying down the stairs with a speed he didn't know he had. He leapt over several steps until he reached the first floor and managed to catch up with the weird guy.

            Soon, they found themselves running side by side towards the exit. Lester looked at Dennis, then the exit, then at Dennis again. "What kept you?"

            Dennis gave the absurd creature a look and his giant scythe carelessly clanked on the floor as he ran. "**_You hosed her down_**!" he yelled, more high pitched that he had intended.

            "Guess I did!"

            "You hosed her down! You hosed the Queen of Avalon down!"

            "Yes, yes, I heard you the first time…!"

            "You hosed her down—!"

            "Oh, _SHUT UP AND RUN!_" Lester snapped, grabbing him by the arm and pushing, almost booting him through the building's main entrance that led to the street. Lester charged out the front doors and out towards the light a few seconds later. He came to a screeching halt—

**PART the _FIFTH_**

Lester stepped out the building and crashed right into Dennis, who was standing like there like a moron, yelling, "The streets! Where is everybody?!"

Dennis looked up towards the sky and wondered since when did the sun shine blue. He thought for one moment he was wearing sunglasses, and unconsciously reached as if to take them off. Because that's how the streets looked like. As if God had thrown a blue drape on the sun, as if He took off his shirt, tossed it away and it had accidentally landed on the bright lamp on the table.

A thousand stupid questions crossed his mind, like if anybody else was seeing the world the way he saw it, then it hit him there _was no one else. It was— he didn't know what time it was. It could've been anytime. But these streets were never empty, it was the City That Never Slept, so that meant that all day, everyday, there were people in the streets, _people_—_

The cars were there, but there was no one inside. The traffic lights were green and one could see those automobiles frozen in place in the precise moment the owners hit the accelerator. Hundred of blurry cars had frozen in motion, with comet-like tails as in a photo taken with an unsteady hand. A frozen mirage—

"It's the Sea of Driac, moron," said Lester, the one that just gave Titania an early bath, but he was rewarded by Dennis with a blank look. The guy gave him a growling sigh, "The Dreamtime, the land of Shadows! Virtual Reality, Shangri-La, where Rip Van Winkle and Urashima Taro buy their beer!" Dennis was still looking at him quite stupidly. "The Turtle _Palace_? The thing that happens when you get high? Boy, you really _don't remember any of this, do you? In case you're wondering, my name is Lester Kramer and I'll be your savior tonight!"_

            Lester grabbed the still-dumbstruck Dennis by the arm and ran with him towards a motorcycle lying next to the building. He climbed on, turned on the ignition and yelled, "Come on, angel, we gotta go before the devil catches up with us! Make that thing smaller, we can't handle that much weight!"

            He was referring to the scythe; that much Dennis could guess. "Wait, who _are_ you?!"

            "I'm Santa-fucking-Claus and I ditched my reindeers for this Harley! Look, we don't have time for twenty questions! Make that scythe smaller and make it smaller _right now!"_

            "Why? Where are we going!?"

            "Jeez, where do think? Away from _her_!" 

Lester gestured towards the apartment building. It was changing. The world was still tinted in blue, but that building was turning a shade of red, a watery red, as if somebody had mixed in more water than was necessary in the ink.

Dennis watched aghast. Maybe the weirdo had a point.

He grabbed the scythe firmly with both hands, trying to figure out what to do with it. "But how do I…?" He had an unconscious idea about it, the same way anyone understands the meaning of a dream even if there are no words. Usually, he would interrupt himself with doubts and questions, but in that moment, when he didn't have enough time to reason, he just rolled with what his instincts told him.

            "Look, it's so cute!"

            Lester lowered his sunglasses and noticed the scythe was now a small brown teddy bear with a pretty red ribbon around its neck. "If I didn't know Seres can't have a sense of humor, I'd swear he does these things just to spite me…" he muttered.

            "You know about Seres?"

            Lester rolled his eyes in exasperation and said, "Just get on the stupid bike, will ya?"

Dennis considered his options, but there weren't a lot of them. So, grabbing the teddy bear securely by the waist, he climbed on the back of the motorcycle as he began to sense that drums of war were in the air.

*                                 *                                  *****

The blue-tinted streets that surrounded them in the Sea of Dirac were beginning to acquire a violet tone. Dennis could understand it a little better — It was a bubble, this city, a temporary reality trapped in a glass orb. If somebody shook it, everything would float and quietly settle down like flakes inside a ball with a miniature city inside.

Lester revved the bike and the world sped around them; shops became a blur, the cars they passed by became indistinct masses of empty metal devoid of people. It was the _speed_, the unnatural speed that Lester made them travel.

The indicator didn't pass fifty, but Dennis was very much aware they were traveling faster than that and he increased the strength of his chokehold on Lester accordingly. He felt gravity trying to reclaim them and the bike groaning under the pressure of going faster than it had ever gone.

He felt death was near, but not necessarily from a spectacular crash into an incoming truck —fixed are the Shadows inside the Sea of Dirac— but death itself was in the air. The funeral flowers had rotted and the scent of a marsh, a bog, replaced them. The air was so heavy, one could cut a corner off and weigh it in a silver scale. Even with this speed, slicing through the air, he felt oddly breathless, even a little hot and humid.

There were drums in the air, drums— drums that reminded him of old movies that take place in the jungle, or maybe a battlefield in the rain where a soaked general tries to lead a hopeless and uncomfortable battle. 

"Don't let it get to you!" Lester yelled over the roaring of the motor, "If it says its fifty, then pretend its fifty!"

Dennis knew the motorcycle was somewhere in the nineties, maybe even the _hundreds_, but it was a disturbing thought and he chose to lie to himself. He closed his eyes tightly and _believed_—

When he opened his eyes, the world around him slowed considerably and the air was somewhat lighter. He found he could breathe better, even hold a conversation. He didn't waste time: "_The air!" he yelled to Lester, trying to beat the noisy engine. "_It's her! She's pissed, isn't she? She's making it heavy!_"_

"Her irrational hatred is doing that, yes, but you can ignore it if you try. You can even ignore the motor." Lester replied. His tone was even, and strangely enough, Dennis could hear him perfectly well. "It's all about perception."

Dennis blinked in surprise and then he understood; while he was being subjected to the usual laws of physics, Lester had somehow placed himself above them. It was the power of the land of shadows, the one place where you could ignore your senses if you really tried.

            "We're in a very subjective place," Lester idly commented as if they were sitting somewhere having tea and not speeding down the ghostly streets in a hellish frenzy with a Harley. "See the red sky? The queen has proved herself to be incredibly thin-skinned and she's letting us know that…"

            Once Dennis got enough grips on his senses, he blurted, "_Us? I think _you're_ the one on her mind! Who the hell are you, anyway!?"_

            "Chona, the wonder pig!"

            "Fuck you! I want an explanation!"

            "An explanation!?" Lester snarled and he revved the bike and accelerated a great deal, mostly to give Dennis a scare. The quick burst of acceleration made Dennis feel the speed in all its glory. "You were about to destroy our universe and I saved it! So kiss my ass, angel, and do what I say!"

The world went crazy again for Dennis and it took him another moment to adjust his senses accordingly. By then, he was seriously distrusting that man and joining him started to look like a bad idea_. Out the frying pan… he thought bitterly._

Nonetheless, he worked up enough strength to yell, "Stop this! I'm tired of all this bullshit! I want answers and you'll give them to me!"

            Lester's face twisted into contemptuous surprise. "You really _are clueless! You're the judge that chooses who lives and dies. It's not _that_ difficult a concept…"_

            "That's not the whole story and you know it!"

            "You want the truth!?" Lester barked back with a playful smirk, "You can't handle the truth!"

            "Don't you quote movies at me!" Dennis snapped outraged, "I want to know how I got here, I want to know how _you got here, and more importantly I want to __get out of here!"_

Lester did not answer, for a deafening thunder overlapped over every sound, even the sound of the bike. The sky overhead became bloody red, and it started raining something very watery that stung a lot when it hit them. Little balls of fire that looked very unpleasant soon followed it.

Dennis looked upwards and saw the sky colored red. A particularly nasty looking purple cloud was in the lead of a coming storm; it was the one doing all the shooting of what turned out to be sulfur and molten lava.

            "LESTER KRAMER, YOU WILL NOT GET AWAY WITH THIS!" said a loud booming voice wrapped in the purple cloud thundering in the sky. "YOU CANNOT TELL ANYTHING TO THE AVATAR! I FORBID IT! RETURN FROM WHENCE YOU CAME OR SUFFER MY WRATH!"

            "God!?" Dennis shrieked.

            "_In her dreams_!" Lester replied, not to Dennis but to purple cloud that from the sky began to zoom in on them. "_Titania_!" Lester yelled in defiance, "**_The book was better!_**"

            "FUCK YOU, KRAMER!" snapped the cloud.

The storm over them turned both crimson and far more violent. It started raining; acid rain that began to burn through their clothes and the chunks of fiery rocks became the size of SUVs. 

"INCOMING!" yelled the cloud when molten rock struck a nearby Toyota they barely passed by. Several hit cars around them and they exploded though Lester managed to avoid the burning wrecks with the skill of Evel Kenivel. But several bits of shrapnel whizzed by Dennis' ear and the cloud's shooting was getting increasingly accurate.

Lester speeded up and Dennis gave up all hope on blocking the sensory overload. The Dreamtime just didn't agree with his senses. He just hung on and hoped one of those meteorites didn't kill them or that they didn't get run over by an incoming truck driven by Titania herself. He hoped they would get away from the race with just a minor fruit-cart crash.

Somehow, Lester managed to both speak and avoid the cars frozen in motion all around them. It was the Dirac 500; the Sea of Miracle's Obstacle Course Derby; and Dennis honestly thought he was going to lose his lunch.

            "I can't keep this up forever!" Lester yelled, "Do something, Seres!"

            "Do _what_ exactly!?" Dennis snapped in return.

            "Anything, you fool!"

            A fraction of a second later, the scythe-turned-teddy became a huge red and white umbrella that encompassed the whole motorcycle while somehow not being blown out of Dennis' hand by the wind resistance.

            "I hate you, Seres. I really do." Lester muttered in return.

But the umbrella was enough to block the acid rain and the molten lava, enough to exasperate the cloud even further. The motorcycle sped up even further, soon it left the purple cloud a good distance behind.

"It's time for your facts-of-life speech, angel!" Lester yelled, "Time to hide! _Hang on!"_

Lester began showing his complete dominion over the shadows at that moment. The roaring engine was no more; he killed the sound like he hit the mute on a remote control. The scenery stopped moving and it was only a second later that Dennis realized they had come to a complete stop.

Not only that; the world was now completely different.

*                             *                               *

Maybe the jump was even worse than the mad race Dennis had just survived. The world kept spinning around him in different colors, shapes and sizes until everything settled into one view, one image, one perspective out of hundreds he could feel in the back of his head.

He blamed his powers for that bad trip. But the weirdo that 'saved' him was not as powerful as Dennis, he knew that much. _I understand… Dennis thought to himself, _the more powerful you are, the more things you see in the world… the harder it is to **focus…**__

But he managed to focus. The images settled around him and made the picture of a very familiar room, a spacious place… some kind of lab?

"Remember this place, angel?"

Dennis blinked and found himself in the main Ulead Genetics laboratory, circa two years ago, when they hadn't repainted or even sold the place to its current owners. He wore a white coat and an ID tag hanged from his front pocket. He grabbed it, read his name, then noticed another thing. "Glasses?" Dennis muttered as he took off such glasses and stared at them surprised. He looked around —he didn't need them— and gasped softly. "This is…"

"Our lab," Lester finished, "Yours, mine and Mary's."

He could recognize it now. It didn't have the looks of a high tech lab. In fact, it was abnormally homely, painted in bright colors, with a sign that read 'NEVER PUSH THE RED BUTTON' with a little smiley face next to it taped to a quarter-billion dollar microscope.

            Other matters interrupted his reminiscences. "Titania—"

            "Is still around, yes, but I've just bought ourselves a couple of minutes…" Lester replied. He too wore the white coat, although he still had the sunglasses on. He quietly removed them and said, "We need to _talk_. Do you recognize me now?"

For a moment, he didn't recognize that weird guy that just went head-to-head against Titania and somehow lived to tell the tale. For the moment, anyway.

But he did _know_ him. He was in a picture, an image burned in his head where he and Mary were going to meet in the park. It was autumn, the leaves were golden, and they were going to meet—

"I remember you…" Dennis said, very softly. 

Another thing he had always known. A thing he should've clearly remembered; something he should've been happy for. So when he said, "You're my best friend," he didn't mean a word of it because it felt like it happened decades, lifetimes ago, not nine measly months.

It just served to confirm to him the great gulf between the Anderson who died in the lab and the Anderson of today, the one that was a god's mask. The little part of him that still had something left of the old Anderson _did_ remember this place; they were all such a happy family. In that context, he remembered Lester Kramer perfectly well: the brilliant scientist that was their closest thing to a class clown. He was so brilliant, and yet he had so much charm…

            "You flatter me," Lester interrupted. "You know the funny geek in high school? That was me. Chewbacca costume and light sabers and all that jazz. You? You were always a Trekkie. I thought Kirk was a moron and you said Chewbacca was a walking rug."

            "I don't know why I didn't recognize you…" Dennis continued, oddly detached from the fake lab, from the fake pictures in the fake desk, to the fake person standing before him. "Dr. Kramer, head of the microbiology department… I had known you since forever. We were friends since college…"

            "Yes, Dr. Anderson, that we were."

            Dennis unconsciously shook his head, trying to shake off the disbelief. "What's the meaning of this?" he said, soberly. "What's really going on? Aren't we supposed to be—"

            "Dead?" Lester interrupted with a little smile. "You wanna know the truth? Can you _handle_ the truth…?" 

Lester began to stroll about the lab, picking up test tubes and such, then putting them down where they belonged. He was taking his sweet time in thinking his arguments. 

"Basically," he began, "we're the judges. Ok, not exactly. You're the judge and I'm the reject. You're Seres although I used to be Seres too before I got fired for so-called 'unruly behavior'. But what do They know, anyway? Always up there in the celestial palace and all—"

"I _know_ that, Lester." Dennis interrupted, "I know I'm supposed to be a judge, I know I'm supposed to decide if Titania's being fair. If you should kill all to save one. Save a woman that in another plane is fine and well to begin with and simply wasn't meant to live in _this_ world. But that wasn't my question."

"I know that. You want to know who you are. And what Seres is exactly. But that's a trick question…" Lester drifted off for a second and smiled to the thin air. "Think about it, angel," he continue, more to himself than Dennis, "What do you feel when you see this lab? Do you feel anything at all? Can you _really_ call yourself Dennis Anderson tonight? But wait! It gets better…" Lester climbed up a counter and slouched there, letting his legs dangle off a side of the table. "You're also mildly interested about why you're supposed to be a judge and what's the point of having a trial to begin with when the die has already been cast? Why have the gods led Titania around by her nose when it's clear that—"

            "I wasn't going to do it," Dennis finished as he stared off into space. "I'm never going to allow this world to just be destroyed because one person thinks it's unfair—"

            "—when that same person brought it upon herself."

            Wide-eyed, he looked at Lester. "Am I supposed to do that? All this time everybody's been treating me like a god, even though I feel like a human. Do all gods feel like I do?"

            "Do all crazy people stop and say 'man, I am really fucked up'?"

            Dennis' frown deepened considerably. "Seres is not really a god either, is it?"

            Lester refrained from comment and arched his elegant eyebrow.

            "It's a weapon. It may have some sort of consciousness, but it's hardly at god-level," Dennis continued and paused for an answer. He didn't get any. "It's not qualified to be anyone's judge."

Lester gave him a strange crooked grin. "It is _now. Because now it has the programming to be…" he smile toothily "…_a real boy_." He jumped off the counter and approached Dennis, getting right up his face at an uncomfortably close distance. "Wake up and smell the pixie dust, Pinocchio. In case you're wondering, when I say you are Seres, I mean it. You _are_ Seres. Why, I've known you since you were…" he extended his hands to a moderate distance, "…this big! A little storm of magical power devouring everything in your path. Oh, the good old days…" He stopped grinning for a moment and said, "The powwows in the Big Bureaucracy in the Sky knew that too. So when dear Titania said she wanted to 'borrow' you to 'save' the daughter, they knew you'd only destroy the timeline and everybody in it, because the daughter is already saved. I believe the term is 'determinism'…"_

And his tone went down a few decibels…

"In a multiverse where everything is true and all choices are accounted for, you can't change time. All the possible choices you can do are already done, over and over in thousands and thousands of timelines. It's nihilism in its finest… It really doesn't matter if you don't kill me, because in some other timeline you do. Hence, the whole idea that your choices matter is rendered… worthless." He shrugged. "All our choices are worthless if in some other universe we do the exact opposite. It's depressing, really. More depressing if you consider that undoing your choice means undoing the timeline that comes with it. The philosophers call it 'cosmic determinism'. I like to call it fate. Unless you say that you can change your fate by dying, but that's not much of a choice at all, is it?"

Their eyes locked for a moment, and Dennis said in a slow, methodical whisper. "Why must Seres be taught to be a mortal?"  

He thought his own words for a moment and realized they needed to be amended. 

"Or…should I ask why was **_I_ reduced to mortal minds? Why make me human?"**

That little bit earned him a delighted look from Lester. "Ooh!" he smirked with morbid interest; "Interesting choice in pronouns!" Just as quickly, though, he stopped smiling and turned serious. "You're human to lessen the judgment, my dear Seres…" he muttered in a deadly monotone, "I know you. You would've killed this world without thinking… because in your purest form, you are Atropos, the one that cuts the strings, She Who Cannot be Turned. You needed to be a human if you were to achieve real…what's the word?… _perspective." He said, rolling the word in his mouth. "That was the gods' idea, at any rate. The gods were not amused when Titania dragged you away from your sacred duties, so they made sure to give the queen a hard time by adding free will to your mind. It annoyed the hell out of her and gave the little mortals a fair chance. But you can imagine that Titania didn't waste time to use it to her advantage."_

            "She suppressed me."

            "And did a fine little number in your mind, I'm afraid."

            "I didn't realize. I didn't know."

            "You were stuck in a long dream. You were programmed to not notice the obvious. Like the job. Like the fire. Like the fact that you hardly need any sleep most of the time. Or your complete lack of past memories. Save but a few details here and there…"

            "Like you."

            "Like me."

A momentary pause…

            Dennis tried to wrap his mind around the concept, but it was almost too much for him. "No. I'm not just a weapon anymore. What about my memories? My personality? If I perform the spell, I will… cease to be. I… don't want to be a weapon anymore."

            "Ah!" Lester said, grinning from ear to ear. "Spoken like a real boy! Welcome, then, to the human condition!"

            Very slowly, Dennis shook his head. "I never stopped being human, Lester. It's just that… its path and mine crossed and they became one. Half of me may be a cloud, but the other half is very much corporeal, Dr. Kramer. And there's something I still don't understand."

            "What is it? It seems pretty crystal-clear to me…"

            Dennis looked up and his eyes met with Lester's. "What's _your part here? If you came to the same conclusions in the first trial, why the need for a __second one?" _

            Lester stopped smiling.

            "In fact," Dennis said as he stood up and grabbed the umbrella that became a scythe, "What's in it for _you_? Half of me considers you the best friend I've ever had. The other wants to grab your neck and squeeze. Why does Seres seem to hate you so much?"

            Lester snorted and with a wary smile said, "Heyyyy, angel, no need to get difficult when we're almost at the other side!"

            "You were the first judge, Lester. You too realized…when Seres was you, it also realized that it could be real. _And you_… you also didn't want to die! Not again!"

            "Dennis, don't do this…"

Dennis wasn't quite listening; he was working hard on recalling those memories. "You _screwed up_, didn't you? You…" He closed his eyes and focused. It was there, on the tip of his tongue… An image, the reason why Seres was so angry, the reason for the second subterfuge…

            "_Revenge?" Dennis finished, startled with himself. He blinked several times and faced Lester with a look of complete surprise. "You invalidated the trial because of your stupid revenge!?"_

            Lester gave him a self-righteous gasp. "Don't you **_dare_ get cocky on me, _Dennis!" he said, making his name sound almost like an obscenity. "****__You, of all people, should be siding with me! It was unfair! She shouldn't have done it!"_**

            "Shouldn't have done _what_?"

            "Bring us back, you _moron_!" Lester snapped, somehow losing all the wonderful self-control that let him get this far. "Bring us back to be empty vessels! And IT let her get away with it! She defied the very heavens and all she got was a slap on the _wrists!?"_

Dennis couldn't begin to scratch the surface. He stared aghast, not quite sure what to make of him. Lester looked very angry and the lab was getting colder by the second.__

            "What did you do, Lester?" he asked, his tone dropping several decibels, as he fell into deep alarm.

            "Nothing! And that's the _point!" Lester snapped back. "She should've died, Seres, and you know it. And if IT couldn't do it, I certainly could! Infinite mercy, **_my ass_! What's the point of a fucking trial if the wicked don't get punished!?"**_

            "You tried to _kill_ her?!"

            "Wouldn't you!? She ruined our lives, Seres! _Dennis_! She ruined both our lives!" Lester continued, "I was happy where I was! I really _was_! Or don't you _remember? Remember what it was __like?"_

            Actually, he couldn't. He had a vague idea that it had been very pleasant, but other than that— "But we still have now. Today. Here." Dennis replied unconvincingly. "We do have our lives back. Our memories…"

            "_What memories?" Lester chuckled bitterly, shooting him a look that stopped him cold. "This is not __ours. This never was ours. For all practical purposes, the men that worked here are dead as doorknobs! Don't you get it, imbecile!?****__ You're not Dennis any more than I am Lester!"_

            "…you didn't like being Seres?"

            Lester chuckled bitterly. "I forgot that you don't remember… You can't enjoy ultimate power when your humanity is stripped away from you. Unlike you, I remember perfectly well my life before Seres. You… 'Dennis'… are a new man. Me… I have so much emotional baggage you wouldn't believe…"

            "You remember your life and I don't?"

            "Yeah…" Lester sassed. "And that makes you a second-rate human, Pinocchio."

            "Cretin!" Dennis snapped back, sounding surer of himself, "So what if I _am Seres! It doesn't matter! At least I'm here!"_

            Lester limited himself to snort at him in contempt. "You really _are a puppet. You don't remember any of it at all. How pathetic. After all, ignorance is bliss. But me, well, I've _seeeeeeeen_ the light, _praise Jesus_! and I have more stomach for dealing with evil folks than He ever did…"_

            Without even thinking about it, Dennis pointed the scythe against his chest. "Try it and I swear I'll lop your head off."

            Lester looked at the scythe, then at Dennis and arched an eyebrow. "Then I guess that makes us enemies, Pinocchio…"

Dennis knew he ought to be sorry for hearing him say that, only that he wasn't. Whatever friendship they had, it was only a distant memory wrapped in nostalgia. They both knew it. It had its moments, but they weren't his. They never belonged to him in the first place.

"Go ahead, chop my head off, I dare you!" Lester sneered as he stepped a little bit closer, "Do you get it _now, angel? The trial is decided. The stones were cast the first time around. You're here just to tie up the loose ends. Me."_

…And though the friendship may have been nothing but a relic, but Dennis was shocked about how much it actually affected him, here and now.

"Kill you?! No!" Dennis gasped. No, no, no, that couldn't be It. There had to be more than that. Had to be.

He knew that what Lester wanted he could not get. More than that, Dennis also knew he wanted a good share Seres' power, which he certainly _must not_ get.

But _kill_ him?

            "But that's not fair…!" Dennis whispered to himself. "I don't— I just can't, even if I know it's not real anymore!"

            Lester, however, gave him a sweet smile. "You were always the sentimental one. I guess some things never change."

Without warning, Lester gave Dennis a quick strong elbow jab that sent him rolling to the floor, though he was unable to make him drop the scythe. He did, however, manage to startle Dennis with that act of violence, waking him up to the fact that the respect wasn't mutual.

"_Maktub_, say the Arabs…" Lester retorted with a sneer "…_It Is Written!"_

And the world skipped a beat again.

**PART the _SIXTH_**

Brooklyn had long ago dropped any pretense of trying to keep time in that dungeon. He and Puck could've been alone in there for minutes, hours, or even days. Normally, he would be able to guess the time by instinct, but tonight (if it was still night) all his senses were out of joint.

Meanwhile, Puck seemed to be powerless and in a bad mood. Testy, he had deflected any questions about his stay in there. But there were times when instead of angry, he turned tense. Brooklyn got the feeling that fey was seeing things he couldn't.

He could certainly hear the things Puck was hearing, though. And feel the things that he felt back in the real past. It was deep, melancholic, and so strangely addicting that Brooklyn had a hard time trying to clear his mind.

_I can't stay here…_we_ can't stay here forever…_

But Puck hadn't shown much resolve. He just sat on the floor, looking tired and angry at regular intervals, and sometimes…

            "…it's the nature of this place…" Puck had whispered at one moment, "…your imagination can get the best of you in here…"

            "And what are you imagining?"

            Puck didn't reply, but gave him a scalding look. Annoyed, he ignored the gargoyle, even though he insisted on talking.

            "Must've been tough, eh? Being alone in this place?" Brooklyn said, testing the waters. "We have to do something to leave."

            "…I told you we can't. We'll get lost instead…"

            "But I know where _I'm_ going. The park with the golden leaves."

            Puck snorted and gave him that 'you're-such-an-imbecile' look. "Remember that this is a fantasy land," he said with annoyance. "If you lose control, nobody's going to save your ass. In fact, I'm surprised we've lasted this long. I feel the storm gaining power."

            "It's getting _stronger_?" Brooklyn snapped alarmed. "How long are we supposed to wait?"

            "Not long…" Puck whispered in reply "…something's happening. I—_oh, __Brooklyn__!_" The fey dropped his knees and covered his head with his hands, as if he were in pain. "_Someone's angry_!"

            Brooklyn ran to his side and tried his best to comfort him. "Who!? Who's angry!?"

            "I don't—" he trailed off for a second. "Yes…YES, I do!" He looked up at Brooklyn looking rather shocked. "It's _Titania_! She's alive! And _pissed_!"

            "Where is she?!"

            "I can't tell—this land in connected to everybody, Brooklyn, it's very hard to make out!"

            "Puck, we _seriously_ need to get the hell out of here!" the gargoyle snapped. "If everything is a dream here, can't we wish ourselves back in Wyvern?"

            "We could get lost! Too risky!"

            "But we have to try, we can't stay here forever!" Brooklyn retorted and went to his knees by Puck's side. "I wished myself out of that rooftop. Sure, I may have gotten the direction wrong, but I got out of there! I just need to focus harder! If I can do it, so can you…" 

            "We wait, Brooklyn," Puck said with a great air of finality, feeling as if he were dealing with an impudent child, "I'm not going to risk it."

            "Wait for what? The universe to blow up in our faces?" Brooklyn retorted instead. He bit his lip and decided to push Puck's buttons. "…Or until your fantasy gets out of hand and Oberon comes walking through that door? I know what you're trying to do. But your grip isn't going to last forever—"

            "**_Shut up, imbecile!_" Puck snapped viciously at the gargoyle, with more pent-up anger than the gargoyle expected. Brooklyn found himself crawling a few inches back.**

Puck noticed the shock reflected in Brooklyn's eyes and seemed just as surprised with himself. He took a deep breath and sat on his knees, and he suddenly looked very tired and worn out.

            "I just…I'm tired, gargoyle. So sick of this place…"

            "Puck…"

            "Then there's Oberon and Titania and…"

            "Puck, please…" Brooklyn grabbed him by the shoulders and gave him a soft shake until he was sure the fey was finally paying attention to him. "I know where I have to go…" the gargoyle whispered, unwilling to drop the subject, "To the park. Seres told me to."

            Sullen, Puck mumbled," Why would Seres tell you that? Why does it want you there?"

            "Dunno…" the gargoyle replied.

            Puck's expression merely hardened. "Fine, what_ever. If you need to go, then by all means go out the same way you got in!"_

Brooklyn let go of him and decided to drop the conversation. The big problem was that he wasn't sure how he ended up here in the first place. After all, didn't he wish he was back in the office? Avalon was several thousand magical miles away from Wyvern Castle— Or was it?

            "Puck, why isn't the real Oberon here yet? Isn't this Avalon?" Brooklyn said quickly, as an idea dawned on his mind. "Isn't this supposed to be a fantasy?"

            "That's what I've been telling you all the time, idiot," Puck snapped back, getting angrier with each passing second.

            "And you also said that this place made your imagination get the best of you," the gargoyle pressed on. "Don't you see? Puck, this isn't _my fantasy!"_

            "Don't you think I don't know _that_?!" Puck barked at him, this time getting up from the floor and delivering a good kick to Brooklyn's stomach.

The startled gargoyle stared at the Puck in utter shock as the latter yelled, "I don't want to dream of this place anymore than you do! I wish I could go home! So don't you _dare, even for a second, think I want to be here!"_

            Snarling, Brooklyn gathered his courage and snapped, "Then quit moping around and actually do something about it! You're no better than Titania!"

            "How could—"

            "Shut up for once and just listen to me!" the gargoyle snapped as he hopped to his feet and faced the fey, "You know what I've just realized!? That a great deal of what happened to Titania may have been our fault! What the hell made her think we'd actually sit back and let her destroy our world!? Our actions did! We're all guilty of wallowing in our pain and whining about our lives! How many times have we said 'That's Not Fair' these past few months!? I know it's not fair, but we haven't really tried to get it over with!"

            "_Excuse me for being a whiner, o wise and benevolent Brooklyn!" Puck snapped back, and his face was acquiring a bright shade of red, either because of the fury or the sadness or maybe both; the feelings that had been intensified in the imaginary dungeon. "Then again, you haven't gone through what I've gone through. _You're _not the one trying to put up a happy face for Xanatos all the time! __You're not the one that's getting dragged back in maybe two days if you don't get Titania back! I've put my life on hold for the lot of you!"_

            "Then we won't allow Oberon to drag you back!" Brooklyn replied. At this, Puck chuckled bitterly. "I mean it!"

            "Oh, gargoyle… I'll believe it when I see it…"

            "I _mean_ it!"

            "Fine! Fine, you mean it, hooray for me!" Puck snorted back. Again, he leaned against a wall and sled down. He closed his eyes and seemed to wait for something. 

Brooklyn wished he could say something comforting, but all the evidence about Puck's stay in Avalon started creeping in and refused to leave. He remember the things Xanatos muttered, the strange face he saw back in the Cloisters— He wished he could say something, but now really wasn't the time. Not when the world stood at the edge of a knife.

Though he understood perfectly well, Brooklyn also understood Puck was merely wrapping himself in the old memory, and if that seductive hum, that weird whisper, was affecting a gargoyle that had nothing to do with it, what was it doing to Puck then?

He stared at Puck and he knew the look on that face. It was old-fashioned hopelessness, intensified by the magic of the Dreamtime. But he had seen it in the real world too, in Elisa, in Angela, Xanatos and… sometimes… himself in particular nights when everything seemed to go wrong.

This was not the place to be hopeless. If he didn't help Puck snap out of it, they were going to be stuck there for a long time. It was his fantasy, so he was the way out.

Yet Puck didn't seem inclined to do anything about it. In fact, he was just sitting there, with his eyes closed, without any hint of moving sometime soon. Brooklyn started to get worried— _What__ is he seeing, anyway? It's his fantasy, so I'm not necessarily seeing everything to it._

            But Puck spoke first, before Brooklyn could even plan his arguments. Even then he seemed to be speaking to himself, not the gargoyle. "Don't tell Xanatos I'm lying to him, all right?"

            Brooklyn blinked, a little surprised, and even a little intrigued. He sat down and chose to see where this was going. "About?"

            "I just… it's hard to play cheerleader when you don't mean it. Thankfully, I've had centuries of practice to say…and do… things I don't mean. I'm very good at it, don't you know…"

It took Brooklyn about thirty seconds to figure it out. He opened his beak. And closed it again.

            "I'm a trickster, Brookie. That's what I do. I trick." The fey sighed a little and rearranged himself so that he sat cross-legged. "I know that was probably a horrible mistake, and I have no idea how I got myself so tangled up, but… I just didn't think it through. I guess because I really thought I was going to die."

            "Puck…" Brooklyn began, as his expression softened considerably.

            Puck merely chuckled. "And you may be right about Titania, though. About our influence on her. I remember her telling me things about you… about your hard times… I don't remember what, exactly, but she was very sorry for what she did to us… But I do remember the things I said…"

            "Puck—"

            "I do remember wishing to die more than once…" he continued, pressing on, "…I just didn't know she was listening…"

            Very slowly, Brooklyn muttered, "We've… all gone through that phase in our lives…"

            Puck laughed, almost giggled. "Oh, you've never done what I just did, trust me. You know… I think that if she had told me her plans when I was in that state of mind… I don't think I would've stopped her," he said, plain and simple. "So you're right about that. In fact, I think none of us, not even you, would've stopped her."

            "That's because I didn't know what I know now…" the gargoyle replied.

            Puck arched an eyebrow and waited for the answer.

            "That there _is_ life after Goliath," Brooklyn said with a great air of finality. 

            And Puck couldn't help but smile a little.

At this, Brooklyn stood up. They really had to get out of there and he had an idea about how to get them out. "You said…" Brooklyn began, "That this is a land of dreams. Then we can dream ourselves back to the office. We may get lost… but we _have to try. We _have_ to let go of the past… or it's going to kill us and you know it."_

            "Where do you want to go?" Puck asked, sounding more interested and less dejected than before.

            "I think the question is where do _you want to go."_

            He extended a hand towards the Puck.

            And for better or worse, Puck chose to accept it.

*                          *                           *

"_Puck!"_

Puck heard someone say his name but had the hardest time opening his eyes. Then the person started to shake the groggery out of him until he could think a little better. He opened his eyes and saw David Xanatos stare back at him. They were on top of… a floating desk?

            "About time you snapped out of it!" Xanatos exclaimed as he gave him a hug. 

            Puck, however, didn't quite notice. He just noticed that he had been laying flat on Xanatos' huge black desk, which was floating on a carpet-turned-jelly. "What the—!?"

            "Oh, you noticed that, eh?" Xanatos smirked. "The quicksand almost got you there. I had the devil's time trying to reach the desk."

Puck stared at Xanatos, then at the carpet-sea, but he didn't have much time to comment when they both heard a scream and an electrical storm formed in the ceiling.

Brooklyn fell from the singularity and made something of a splash, as far as splashes go in jelly. Xanatos lent him a hand and helped the gargoyle get on the improvised boat. Lethargic, he looked just as shocked with the new environment as Puck did. "So…" he managed to mutter, "What did I miss?"

While the gargoyle and the human started to catch up in their respective stories, Puck simply slumped on the desk, feeling horribly wretched…

            "Sorry I had to push your buttons back there…" Brooklyn commented, trying to be casual.

            "I know," Puck sighed, "Dream within a dream. Sort of, anyway. We're back in the real world, but—"

            "Reality isn't what it used to be," Xanatos concluded for him, as he gestured out the window.

            "That's not good, is it?" Brooklyn muttered when the sky outside Xanatos' office turned a suspicious shade of red.

Puck didn't have much time to mull over what happened to him. He and the mortals were too busy watching in horror how molten lava and sulfur emerged from a big purple cloud in the sky.

            "You wanna know the scary part…?" Puck whispered, "…I think that's Titania."

            The other two mortals merely stared at him, then at the plasma cloud. "Bad hair day, you think?" Xanatos whispered.

            "What I said still stands…" the fey continued, ignoring that comment, "Reality and Dreamtime are getting all mixed up, and by the looks of it, the shadows are getting the upper hand."

            "And what I said also matters," Brooklyn insisted, taking his eyes off the window for a moment, "I need to get to the park! Maybe if I wish myself there—"

            "No, you're going to have to go there physically, unless you want to end up in someone else's fantasy," said the trickster. "Although there won't be much physical reality left if this keeps up."

            "Whoa, wait!" Xanatos interrupted, "What's in the park, Brooklyn!?"

            "Two dead guys duking it over," the gargoyle replied, sounding very determined. "Don't ask me to explain it; I just need to be there!" 

            "Gonna stop the Apocalypse by yourself?" the millionaire asked and couldn't help but sound a little sarcastic about it.

            "Technically, this isn't the 'real' end…" Puck took the liberty to explain. "If it were, we'd be dead already. Nope, I think Dennis tried a little too hard to bring Titania back and ended up breaking a few chunks of sky. When you do reach him, tell him to quit it or else we'll all be killed."

            "Well, now that we have cleared _that_ up…" Xanatos sighed.

As for Brooklyn, he leaped to the nearest wall and jammed his claws in the stone to not fall in the carpet-quicksand. Like a giant spider, he slowly made his way towards the exit. "Stay here and wait for me!"

            "All right…" Xanatos retorted as he saw the quicksand around his floating desk, "We're not going anywhere."

            Puck sighed as he and Xanatos watched the gargoyle go and try to talk some sense to the guy that can destroy the world. The millionaire slumped by his side and noticed him depressed. "And what's your problem?"

            "Nothing…" he said, trying to sound casual but failing. "Just a lousy dream."

Xanatos arched an eyebrow but said nothing. He just sat there, looking at times as if he wanted to say something but didn't know what, as they watched a big ugly purple cloud roam around the city spouting sulfur and lava.

            "So…" Xanatos began as he shifted uncomfortably in his seat. "You sure that's Titania out there?"

            "Yes, I'm sorry to say."

            "Hmm…"

            "What's 'hmm'?"

            "You know this could be our last hours…hell, the last fifteen minutes of existence for all we know… I just hate spending them like this, watching Titania make a complete fool of herself."

            Puck gave him a morbidly interested look for a second, and then returned his attention to the city. "Isn't it funny how you feel more alive when you think you're going to die? I saw this movie once…guy throws himself out the window because he's bored with life and realizes that it can be fun and interesting while he falls. Too late, though. He still dies."

            He noticed Xanatos look on him as he spoke. "I think we'll survive this night yet. And everything will be all right."

            "... yeah..." Puck repeated absentmindedly, "...everything will be all right..."

*                           *                            *

Brooklyn crawled the walls sideways rather than up or down as usual, and that made him feel like a giant tarantula. He left a trail of claw marks as he made his way through the exit, trying not to fall in the goo that used to be the carpet. _Hope Xanatos doesn't make me pay for the damage…_

Eventually, in several moves that would make a gymnast proud, he managed to leave the office and close the door behind him. But just when he thought the danger passed, he discovered the rest of the floor was missing.

            "Brooklyn! Over here!"

            The gargoyle crooked his neck around to get a better view of Elisa Maza, who was sitting cross-legged in the…air. "_Elisa_?"

            Elisa stood 'up' in her invisible seat and said, "Oh, God, I'm so glad to see you! Hurry up and save me."

            Save her? Brooklyn felt as if he heard that a lot this week. "Uh… Elisa… _where's the floor?_"

            "Don't ask me," she shrugged. "I just work here."

At least the hallway was of moderate size. Elisa was in the middle of it, but Brooklyn crawled a little closer to give her a good place to grab a hold of him. She made a leap and jumped on his back, and for a moment Brooklyn lost the grip in his right hand. "Whoa…cut down on the doughnuts, Elisa…"

            "Funny…" she replied dryly. Sighing, she looked around. "We gotta get to the others; seen them lately?"

            "Xanatos and Puck are safe in the office. Broadway and the others…I have no idea."

            "Gonna look for them?"

            "No time. We gotta get to the park."

            Elisa blinked surprised. "The dream, right? That's where they'll be…" she said, a little shocked at the coincidence. "What do you think will happen now? To all of us? Do you think we'll…?"

            "I think…" Brooklyn replied softly, "…it's not over until the fat lady sings. A billion things can go wrong, Elisa… but it's such a waste, isn't it? Losing so many lives to save just a couple. I know they're important and that we'll miss them terribly…"

            "But life goes on…" Elisa interrupted, sighing, but accepting. "And we can't go on like this."

            Brooklyn just gave her a small smile and a nod.

            She took deep breath and noticed something. "The window by the end of the hall… we could break it down and leave the castle."

            "Sounds like a plan…" Brooklyn muttered. "Hang on!"

Elisa hung on for dear life as the gargoyle slowly edged towards the window. The drop was still as terrible as usual, but at least she knew Brooklyn was capable of saving her if she fell.

            "You wouldn't know what happened to the floor, right?" she wondered out loud.

            "Oh, reality is falling apart or something. Zero points for guessing who's behind it."

            "Seres?"

            "Damn right. And Puck thinks it's spreading outside city borders. Anyway, the city is breaking apart into fantasies and we'll have to be very careful not to fall into any traps."

            "Well, I guess this is a bad time to tell you Lester's escaped and he's out there trying to be a hero," Elisa replied.

            "Dammit… we should've tied him to a post…"

Eventually, they reached the window and Elisa found it extremely easy to open. Brooklyn crawled outside and helped Elisa reach him. "Well, just how bad is this? Lester was talking about a shadow land and how it's screwing up the world."

Brooklyn wasn't paying much attention to her. "Elisa, you might want to see this…" he said, pointing down.

She looked down and noticed that beneath the castle the whole supporting building was missing, instead she saw what could be described as two turtle legs. "What the—!?"

It wasn't until they were in the air that they could appreciate the sight better: There, floating above the city like a Goodyear blimp was Castle Wyvern, lying on the back of a giant aquatic-type turtle made of solid stone. It appeared to have an orbit around the city, circling it several times. The turtle's shadow was right now covering what appeared to be the 23rd Precinct and neighboring streets.

            "So…" Elisa muttered, "…it's _that_ bad…"

            Brooklyn merely laughed, delighted at the sight. "A man once saved a turtle and in reward it took him to a magic palace! If this means anything at all, then it's an _invitation!"_

**PART the _SEVENTH_**

The world pulled the rug from under Dennis' feet and he fell to his knees, attacked by a dozen images from every mind around him. This just couldn't go on; it was killing him. A few seconds later, the images settled down to only one. 

It was day, and it suddenly felt chilly. He was wearing some sort of jacket and other warm clothing that looked terribly familiar. He raised his head and looked around.

It was the park. The park in an autumn day, those few weeks in the year when all the trees turn gold and the temperature announces that winter is coming. He knew this place. He even recognized the flock of birds that were eating somebody's scattered popcorn.

Most importantly, he recognized the girl in the distance that was calling out his name.

He should've been happy to see her. Run to her and say how much he really missed her, that many terrible things had happened, that…

Except he wasn't going to do that. This was another fantasy and that Mary was not Mary, but just an old worn out memory of her. But he hadn't expected to feel so intensely about it and he wished he could turn it off. And he couldn't.

Because, in the end, Lester had been half-right when he said this didn't belong to him. Yes, they belonged to him, his younger self to be precise. It was unfair to compare a twenty-year-old with his forty-year-old self. Maybe that was the best way to think of it.

Yet that was not the way he thought of it. Not this Dennis, the one that was pulling a juggling act with several planes of reality and was more tired than he would ever be able to admit. One part of him was there, in the park, but the rest of it was barely holding a world together.

_…I wish I could just go home… go home and fade away…_ he started thinking; affected by the same subliminal message he had started without meaning to, but maybe —maybe— wanting it.

He was exhausted. And exhausted people make dumb mistakes.

Then reality —whatever that meant— kicked in with a blow to the head Lester Kramer had provided, in a futile attempt to make him drop the scythe that Dennis still had in a death grip. He had half a second to get out of the way when he noticed Lester also had a weapon; this time a sword. "Just stand still and let me kill you!"

Dennis avoided impalement by blocking the blow with his own scythe. "Stop it! You don't have to do this!"

Lester went at him with the sword again and this time Dennis hurried to boot him in the torso as he raised the blade. He was pushed backwards and almost ended up on the floor, but it bought Dennis enough time to get back up.

He was really going to kill him, wasn't he? Dennis tried to search his mind for any sign of hesitation or regret, but the new Lester Kramer had all the faults of the old one taken to the extreme.

            "What are you looking for, dear Seres? Poking…" he tapped his head, "In here? Why, that's very rude! You're supposed to be the golden boy! You were the one with _manners_!" He attacked again, but Dennis blocked it and pushed him again once more.

            "There's a friend of mine inside that ugly mind of yours!" Dennis snapped back.

            "And there's a moron inside yours that he used to know!" Lester sneered as swung the sword in a big fast curve that this time Dennis was unable to avoid. It ripped through the jacket on the shoulder and it had reached the skin underneath. "_Aha!_ First blood!"

            "This is insane!" Dennis yelled back, getting more worried with every passing second. "I don't want to kill you anymore than you want to die!"

            "Bullshit, Seres, and you know it! You were the one who set it up that way!"

            "_What?"_

            "Oh, you stupid idiot! Naturally, you don't remember that you were the one that wrote my death sentence and shoved it in my face!" Lester screamed, almost like a child in a tantrum, "Don't you remember, god of fate!? You showed me the vision! You wrote how I'm supposed to die!"

            "No, I—"

            "**_But you're the one that's going to die today! I defy you, stars!_"**

Lester attacked, Dennis parried. Rather than a physical battle, it was a fight for the same power source called the Dreamtime. Hooked to the same battery, it was a matter of hogging all the energy before the other guy did.

But applied to physical force, real and worldly, the differences soon came apparent. Seres supplied Dennis with everything he needed to know, the moves, the blocks, and while Lester didn't have the knowledge, he had the guts, the wild anger, and that seemed to sharpen all his moves.

At first, Dennis tried not to hurt him, because he wasn't sure Lester was right about it. But very deep in his unconscious, he knew. 

(_Look at him, the way he just bumbles ahead with that sword, he was always the brute, wasn't he? Always so brash—always such a loudmouth. I was always doing all the real work; he was the public relation man. He had no class. He would just dive into a project head-first, all flash and no substance— Good God or gods or gods and goddesses. Why am I even bothering with all of this?_)

He tried to resist it, try to deny it, but it was there, all right, just beneath the surface, that cynical side of himself that just wanted to fade away, forget everything and just get on with his life.

            "I don't want to kill you!" he warned. "We could still walk away from this!"

            "But we won't!" Lester snapped, "Because it's written already!"

            "You fool!" Dennis snapped in return, "All you ever did was make it happen! Don't you _see_!? If you'd have walked away, you would've never gotten the vision!"

            "If I hadn't gotten the vision, _of course_ I would've walked away!"

            "You never had any intention to leave it alone! All you wanted was your revenge!"

            "I had every intention to leave! I wanted to be happy, just like you! I had plans, Dennis! I wanted to go away!" Lester Kramer, would-be god, spoke these things and for the fraction of a second he dropped all his bravado and grief seeped through his voice. "I wanted to go to an island! With the beach and the sunsets and the drinks with the little umbrellas! I wanted to _live, Seres! To be free! Be __myself. I…" Just as quickly his tone hardened, "…But you didn't want to give me a future. You gave everybody a future but me… That's not fucking fair, old man. Just not fair."_

            "We could rewrite our stories…"

            Upon hearing that, Lester burst into a fit of high-pitched, hysterical giggles. "Oh, you silly boy, you really do crack me up! I want to hear you say so when it really matters! I know your answer even if you haven't heard the question; it's _Maktub_, it's written! So spare yourself the embarrassment and just _die!"_

And something inside Dennis merely snapped. His cynical self decided that he was just too tired, too annoyed, too indifferent to try to talk some sense into this poor copy of Lester Kramer. That in a universe of infinite possibilities, there was only way to have some peace, and that was the former Dr. Lester Kramer's new death.

"**_I…_**" he said, very slowly, as the immortal part agreed with the human part for the first time ever, **_"…should've killed you a long time ago."_**

Lester let out a war cry and lost all reason; he meant to ram that sword inside Seres, twist it to wreck his body and hang it as a souvenir in his house, because it was either him or Lester and it wasn't fair, _wasn't fair_, **_wasn't fair!_**

He was rudely interrupted.

From the sky, like a bird or a plane or Superman, a brick red gargoyle swooped down upon Lester and gave him a much-desired punch in the face.

It was the first time Brooklyn, leader of the Manhattan Clan, had seen the sun and he had enjoyed his time, even if it was a fake sun. He didn't admire it for long; he chose instead to crash into Lester Kramer, fist-first. The two creatures rolled to a stop and continued to fight between themselves; Lester trying to do his best to get away from a gargoyle several times his weight.

            "_Get off me, you winged freak!" Lester was screaming at the top of his lungs._

            "Now, now, play **_nice_**!" Brooklyn retorted with a smirk as he grabbed him by the hair and punched his lights out for good.

Even Lester the Mighty had to crumble in the pain of a hit by a full-grown gargoyle right in the head. He tried, he really tried, but in the end unconsciousness overtook him, closed his eyes and made him fall into oblivion.

*                           *                            *

Like slow-motion, Dennis saw how a gargoyle seemed to appear out of nowhere and just interrupt their fight as if he actually had any business being there. The gargoyle wasted no time in knocking Lester out, and he felt an extreme surge of annoyance against the gargoyle.

Dazed and overwhelmed, he didn't notice Elisa Maza catching up with the group. It was she who snapped him back to the land of the living. When he finally noticed her, it was like seeing the ghost of someone else wearing the same red jacket.

            "Maza… you've changed," he whispered.

            She was taken back by the suddenness of the comment, but ended up smiling quietly and saying, "Yes. Because of you, remember?"

            He took a deep breath and nodded.

            Meanwhile, they were approached by the gargoyle, who had slung Lester over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. "I think this belongs to you," he said, unceremoniously throwing Lester to the ground.

Dennis stared at the unconscious creature in the floor, then at the two mortals. "Thank you…I think." But he didn't quite believe his own words, when he knew he should've been happy. Instead, he felt angry with the two mortals for reasons he didn't understand— or didn't want to understand.

            "Seres…I think we need to talk," the gargoyle began.

            "Yes," Dennis replied, reading his mind like an open book, trying to keep the sarcasm from his tone but not quite succeeding. "And no, you're not going to die. I said that the first trial and I'm saying it again." He stared down at the gargoyle, maybe a little too contemptuously. "Congratulations," he said morbidly, "The universe is saved. You win, Mister…?"

            "Brooklyn," said the gargoyle, "My name's Brooklyn."

Normally, he would be fascinated by the gargoyle, but right now Dennis couldn't give a damn about him. The mortals said nothing when he ignored them for the moment and started to look around.

The girl was still there. It was very far away, so much that he couldn't quite make out her face, but he knew who she was.

He also remembered that day, which was weird, because it was such an unremarkable day. A Saturday, maybe? A Saturday that they didn't have anything to do, so they got together to do some nonsense in the park. Oh… the camera. _Yes, Lester had bought a new camera and he was shooting pictures. Very expensive, that one. For professionals. It was Lester's new hobby; he had bought a book and everything—_

            "That's her, isn't she? Mary?" Elisa Maza said, breaking the enchantment. "Are you… going to talk to her?"

            He shook his head, forced himself to look away from the girl, and turned to face the mortals. "She's a thing from the past, detective. Sometimes you have to let go of the past."

            "Uh, Seres… I don't want to rush you, but Titania is still around, isn't she?" the gargoyle continued.

            "I know…"

            "You have her now," Brooklyn insisted, "That's what you wanted, isn't it?"

            "Yes…"

            "Can you release the spell on the Dreamtime? The city, it's—"

            "_I know, gargoyle,** I know!" he snapped at them, and he saw the two mortals stiffen in fear.**_

And even though he just told them they were saved, he was seriously considering the alternative. It was madness, yes, but he was considering it because he was just too tired to deal with this, with everything.

He knew how pathetically simple it was to let everything go and watch it tumble down, and it would've been a great sight, an amazing thing to experience, although most likely the _last thing _anyone_ would experience ever again._

But then Brooklyn tried to say something, but Elisa placed a hand on his shoulder. "Don't. Just let him say good-bye."

...and Dennis sighed.

No. He wasn't going to it because it was unfair to destroy everything just because he was jaded. It would pass eventually, anyway, the tiredness. Once he stopped the spell and he took a nice nap, everything would look far more cheerful.

A shadow that took over the park distracted him. He looked up and saw a castle riding the back of a turtle, flying through the clouds above them and against the sun, casting a big round shadow directly over them. It looked like something out of a bedtime story.

He stared downwards, back to the distant girl, but the castle blocked then sun and he couldn't make her out anymore. He knew what that meant and what he had to do… give himself permission to live.

            "I can't do it anymore…" he whispered, "I can't keep living in the past. Do you understand me?"

            "We do understand…" Elisa said, "The whole spell was built around her memory, wasn't it? And the ability to keep you from remembering you were dead like her."

            "That's right. Titania used my memory of Mary against me…" Dennis replied, more to himself than her. "I remember this day. It was filled with birds."

The doves were gone in this place, however. The sun did not shine as intensely and the leaves weren't quite as radiant. And it hurt intensely to even look at it, think of it. He would do anything, _anything to exorcise the old memories so that he could live again without the pain of the past._

"Fine. Let's go back to the world."

*                              *                               *

And back they were. In less than a blink, Elisa and Brooklyn found themselves in an apartment they'd never seen before. There was a little kitchen, a decent living room with a moderate entertainment system and a dog next to it, sleeping peacefully.

Elisa ran to the window and stared out. "The night looks normal enough…" she said, but for all she knew, there could be a giant marshmallow man hiding behind the Empire State Building. But it looked normal, so that was enough for the moment.

Lester was also there and he was coming out of his concussion-induced nap. Brooklyn, however, snuck up behind him and forced him to get on his knees. "Welcome back to the land of the living, bub."

"Fuck you, gargoyle!" Lester spat viciously at him as blood ran down his nose, "Where is the little monster!?"

The monster in question walked out of his bedroom and into the living room to greet his guests. "Everything is back to normal. Your fellow gargoyles are in your Clock Tower. I sent your queen to Mr. Xanatos' office. At least she's alive."

            "Does that mean she's not well?" Brooklyn said, very concerned.

            Dennis did not answer, and Lester took the opportunity to sneer, "What is it, Seres? Cat got you tongue?"

            Brooklyn took the liberty to smack him upside the head. "Quiet, fool… your god days are over."

            Dennis still said nothing. He approached Lester and whispered, "What am I going to do with you…?"

            "You know what you have to do…" Lester replied, giving him a drunken smile. "And you're going to do it anyway, because it's _Maktub! It's written! Oooh, and it's going to __haunt you for the rest of your days, angel! You have to, because I'm _eeeeevil_! Go ahead, say it with me! _Eeeeeevil_!" He let out a sick deranged little laugh that made him spit out some of the blood in the broken vessels in his nose and mouth. "You're good and I'm evil and they've already decided I can't live!"_

            "What the hell are you talking about?" the gargoyle interrupted, but Dennis remained silent.

            "He knows what I'm talking about…" Lester sneered back. "You saw the park too, didn't you? And you know you hate it! How does it feel _now, angel, eh? Do you know what I'm talking about now? Do you _know_ what you're going to do now? I do— even if you don't know it yourself! You'll triumph where I have failed, because you'll be free of the shackles once you shoot that gun!"_

The mortals stared aghast as Dennis, indeed, pulled a gun out of his jacket's pocket and aimed it right at Lester's head. "Wait!" Elisa Maza yelled, "You can't!"

"But he must…" Lester replied, looking pass the gun pressed to his forehead and staring at Dennis eye-to-eye, and with a very deadly grin of one that was actually enjoying putting him on the spot, "…that's the deal, my dear. These are the terms they have set out for you: shoot me and you'll be free of the chains that bind you to the memory of the past. The spell that binds you to all your old memories shall be lifted, my very dear Seres, and all it takes is a blood sacrifice. Such is the contract, the bargain. So you have a choice before you… you either shoot me and claim your future or don't, and stay stuck in the dream."

            "Is the pact for real?" Dennis muttered.

            "Very real," replied Lester.

            "Stop this!" Elisa interrupted, "Is that pact worth killing someone you know!?"

            "Oh, yes, it is…" Lester said before anyone could speak, sounding strangely seductive about it, "To people like us, blood is just a small price to pay."

            "_You can't!" Brooklyn insisted, wishing he could get closer, but fearing what Dennis would do if provoked. "I know the pain is hard, I know, I was there! I know what it feels to have the past cripple you!" the gargoyle pleaded. "It happens to all of us! It happened when I lost my leader, Elisa lost her love and Xanatos lost his family! But that is no reason, no excuse! You can't do it!"_

            "But he will do it!" Lester said with a deranged laugh, because he knew his future and ultimately fell into despair, tired of resisting against it so much for so long. "Do it already. By my grace I know your choice even before I met you. Oooh, but it will keep you awake until the day you die, I know that too. So come on, boy! Come on! **_Do it! _**I _dare you, Dennis Anderson! Come on, __doctor! It's what I would've done in your place! Let go of the past! _Be free!_"_

And he did it. He did it because it was written that he would not resist so much and the rage was stronger than his mercy. He shot him, not once but three times in the head to make sure he got him, and Lester slumped forward dead, with a look that seemed to whisper '_I can't believe he actually did it!'_

Elisa Maza's scream came just two seconds later. She covered her mouth and took several steps backwards and knocked a phone off a nearby table. Brooklyn stared down and noticed himself covered in human blood and his mind went black for a minute or two. The dog was snapped awake by the shots and didn't stop barking.

"It's fate," whispered Seres the god and Dennis the human fell to his knees in pain as the spell ran its course and evaporated, although it felt like falling into a vat of hot wax. The sorcery that Titania had wrapped around his psyche was dissolved just like that.

He screamed until the pain dissipated and the pact was sealed between him and the higher forces, leaving no mark on him but that in his magical blood and his rewired mind. He tried to remember, tried to recall the park and Mary's face, but found that the only thing he recalled was the old photograph that adorned his desk; not the real day, not the real people inside the photo.

He couldn't remember. He couldn't remember anything important, anything that really mattered. Oh, what had he done…?

_"That was murder!" _ Elisa shrieked, "_That's execution! That's cold blood!"_

"That was written…" Brooklyn whispered hoarsely. "That's what Titania counted on… to be unable to resist the burden…"

And maybe he knew it. Because even as the physical pain was fading, Dennis thought for a long time that the guilt that had come with it would never, ever stop.

Elsewhere in the city, four gargoyles awoke in the Clock Tower from a long disturbing dream.

Elsewhere on the planet, a fairy king sensed his wife was back in his world.

Elsewhere in the castle, David Xanatos couldn't keep the Puck from running to his queen's old and battered body.

_NEXT: EPILOGUE_


End file.
